AOC wouldn’t win Harris the swing vote. I love AOC, don’t get me wrong, but with two women on the ticket, it’s too easy for conservatives to paint the duo as “crazy” or “radical.” Sexism remains alive and well here. People still believe the stereotypes and are easily influenced by dog whistles, especially here in the Midwest.

I hope that we get to the point where this isn’t a concern, but as it stands now, we have never had a woman in charge, and a lot of people are afraid of the unknown, so they wouldn’t like the idea of something new on both the presidential front as well as the VP front.

That’s on top of the fact that AOC is from NY and Harris is from CA. We are already irritated that a majority of people in office (and the country) ignore the “flyover” states even though we do a lot for the country (and have really cool cultural and fun places to visit, but this addendum is clearly biased). It really does matter a lot that Walz is one of us. He gets us in a way that people from the coast states don’t. That will influence a lot of votes, and two midwestern states are considered swing states - i.e. states that Harris absolutely NEEDS on her side.

Swing voters here don’t care as much about deploying the national guard. In fact, it’s lauded by a lot of people, including liberals/democrats. Midwesterners are okay with civil disobedience, but only if it’s not unnecessarily destructive or if there isn’t an attempt to gain simply for yourself (ex: looting). I’m not saying that that is what happened when the guard was deployed or that it’s a realistic or correct belief, but in reality, the media painted it that way, so people believe what they were told. So, very few here are holding something like that against him.

I don’t know of anyone in my region who would consider Walz to be truly controversial, and certainly, they think of him as way less controversial than AOC. They might disagree with Walz’s policies or opinions, but they don’t think he’s controversial. Here, AOC’s painted as a pot stirrer and a crazy lady. To reiterate, I don’t agree with this view of AOC, and I respect her immensely, but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that a lot of other people do agree with it. Walz, because of his race, age, cultural background, and experience, is a thousand times more electable than AOC when you’re looking at it from a national perspective.

Wow, that is a very cool concept. I, too, would like to back this.

That’s probably true, but, at least in the US, nothing will really move forward without the populace backing it (or not knowing about it to begin with). Otherwise, those politicians will never get elected again, and whatever climate policy they created will be negated by the new politician.

So it seems like she’s trying to go the route of getting the populace backing first, and then she’ll have that strength to draw on when dealing with politicians. A bunch more people at that point would be also calling for change, so she wouldn’t have to do much convincing. The fear of losing their political standing would be the impetus for change.

In my particularly weird corner of the world, we are still trying to convince people that climate change is real. I can’t imagine how much the deniers would freak out if their elected official backed something that they think doesn’t exist.

Usually, they say it, but not directly to you. The attacking woman will tell another person in the group, and that person will usually tell the target woman what was said by the first woman just “because I thought you should know.” Very, very rarely is it said directly.

I also have seen a lot of people pull the move of talking too loud about things they hate about the target woman on purpose so that the target woman hears it, but can’t really confont the attacking woman because she “should mind her own business.”

I’m not sure what’s happening here, but I’m into it.

That was a perfect correction. I didn’t want to say anything because the joke was funny, and my thought process was pedantic, but you corrected it and kept it funny. Well done.

That has saved me more times than I care to count.

Just for clarification purposes, its 50k per day, doubling every day of noncompliance. So day 1 is 50k, day 2 is an additional 100k, and day 3 is an additional 200k. 3 days = 350k. I agree that it’s not enough, but if they dug their heels in, it would grow really high, really fast, so it was a pretty effective fine.