Yes, I really feel running for president as we currently making them do it is one of the best instructions on being a decent president, a year and change of racing everywhere and meeting everyone and eternal jet lag is good leadership experience.




Cincinatti is essentially the old bastion of the GOP, and it wasn't a big margin, the Mayor, Mark Mallory, is a Dem. But you're seeing Hamilton County not the City, on those maps, and the Metropolitan area includes roughly a dozen counties in KY and IN too. Red v blue county breakdowns are illuminating but one has to remember that unless they have purple shadings it's a touch questionable and a county can flip just by having two medium-small cities in it. Ditto a city, in terms of effective metro area, can easily sprawl over two counties that both break red. It's less surprising though, regarding the voting, complaints of that sort really originate - not saying they aren't real or legit, just who blows the horn - with hardline partisans usually working at the BoE or holding office.

Insofar as elections and polls are controlled almost entirely by the County in Ohio, from a pragmatic POV, we usually consider it ironic when someone in, say, Cleveland, which is hard blue in terms of governance, blows a horn essentially saying that the local Democratic leadership has successfully disenfranchised it's own voters, which is not entirely fair but still pretty on the mark. In Ohio the local county parties get together (unofficially) to decide where the hell to draw the precinct lines and where to put the voting locations, generally an entirely non-partisan effort that in my area at least most revolves around trying to un-fuck whatever new weird ass division of school districts has made voting school board and school levies a nightmare. But there's 2 dem and 2 GOP precinct judges for each precinct and we tend to keep our precincts on the small side in Ohio, what happens is an area that nobody's really bothered to adjust in a while from general business and indifference can swell in size and voter level, and if a couple of precincts are in the same place it can cause a glut, especially when some whacked out person comes in trying to vote with a bottle of prescription medicine as proof of ID... no seriously... general policy in Ohio is just to hand anyone a provisional ballot even if they're trying to vote in the wrong county if they make enough of a fuss just to keep the line moving and to prevent them from, say, going on a shooting spree when you deny Batman the opportunity to vote. Not to be un-PC but that sort of stuff just happens more in the cities... in the country we have our loons vote absentee from their bunker or cult compound. Anyway that clogs things up.



Well... define liberal, have the time I can't remember if I am one, a GOP moderate, or an Arch-conservative. As Jon Stewart said re: Scott Brown "A Massachusetts Republican is still considered like a gay Democrat in other parts of the country", I'm pretty sure from my time spent Exiled to Montana in the middle of the damned winter that 'democrat' there may translate as someone who doesn't believe you have constitutional right to own artillery pieces, except maybe the small 105 mm sort. I personally analyze my own county by precinct and you get some weird bubbles, blue area that aren't cities are usually mostly upper-mid to rich, whereas red parts of cities tend to be very old and/or wealthy. It's just general statistical effect, but when I talk about urban vs rural I'm not really talking red vs blue but more of the historical sense, there tends to be a marked contrast between cities and country where often two cities separated by large distances have more in common in many respects than either do with the villages five miles away.

We didn't abandon racial equality either, barring some assholes, which the Dems have too, we stuck to the old party line, ignore skin color, or do your hardest too. The perception of that being the case is certainly true but I've never felt that charge was valid.



Pretty much agree





Precisely... and by the way I do appreciate your efforts regarding DA in that other thread but 'lost cause' comes to mind. We're not a majority rules places, we're land of law where voting acts as one of many checks.



Well I think we have to accept that it was in the constitution, it's no secret many objected to it from the get go but that's also why that whole 1808 thing is in there.



I'm an American Republican, Joel, I'm being pretty nice not to refer to the UK as Royalist Dogs. No, I was pointing to UK to remind that person was not from the US but a different democracy, and it was us that pushed this system of government forward more than any else, the UK's shed a lot of blood and gold for the cause too, more than anyone else I can think of besides us, maybe more blood depending on how you tally it. I'm not knocking them, but I don't count pre-revolution efforts because we were them until then. In this respect mentioning the UK just means 'not US'





Well they're mostly fair points, it was a rushed, overly brief, and choppy post.