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Comment by sky-kedge0749 | Hacker News Reader

Texas went for Trump over Biden by a margin of about 630,000 votes in a state with a population of close to 30 million. That's a really tight margin for New York and California to decide to cut the whole state loose.

Another factoid: Biden got 5,244,886 votes in New York and 5,259,126 votes in Texas. In other words, more people voted for Biden in Texas than in New York.

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That analysis incorrectly treats Biden and Trump voters as homogenous, which isn’t true. I’ll use Georgia as an example because I lived there. Georgia Democrats are quite different than San Francisco Democrats. Throughout the 2000s state level politics was pretty amiable, with conservative democrats in Atlanta more or less getting along with republicans at the state level: https://www.ajc.com/blog/politics/the-bipartisan-duo-strikes...

That changed recently when the state became the target of national politics. Suddenly, the folks on the other side of the aisle were not Georgia Democrats, but California and New York Democrats. That created a ton of polarization that didn’t exist before.

Right now, our national politics pits California and New York Democrats against Mississippi Republicans, and the rest of us just have to pick a side. Things would be far less polarized if we split up, and it was California Democrats versus California Republicans and Texas Democrats versus Texas Republicans.

Here in Maryland, we have an extremely popular Republican governor that does Republican stuff like oppose public transit and try to keep taxes low. State politics is quite civil, because Baltimore isn’t San Francisco (despite voting similarly for Biden) but neither is Carroll County Mississippi (despite voting similarly for Trump).

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying but it sounds like your theory is that Texan and Georgian voters were hornswoggled by New York and California carpetbaggers so their votes somehow don't matter for this discussion. The plain fact is that as of 2020 approximately as many Texan voters wanted Biden as Trump, to where a 3% shift would have changed the result. Those voters could have stayed home but they went in and cast a ballot. Talking about secession on that margin is ridiculous.

Also, if you're using New York and California Democrats as a proxy for left-wing voters, Biden is pretty disappointing on that front. A huge part of why Biden was the nominee was specifically so he could appeal to centrist voters. The fact that Texan and Georgian voters voted for someone who was picked partly to appeal to those same people should not be surprising.

> I'm not entirely sure what you're saying but it sounds like your theory is that Texan and Georgian voters were hornswoggled by New York and California carpetbaggers so their votes somehow don't matter for this discussion.

No, I’m making a completely different argument. The point is that Georgia Democrats are closer to Georgia Republicans than California Democrats are to Georgia Republicans. When politics is locally focused, there is less acrimony because the sides are less far apart.

But when Georgia politics came under the national spotlight, it became a proxy for the fight between New York and California Democrats and Mississippi Republicans. “Democrat” in Georgia used to mean Zell Miller, but now refers to Nancy Pelosi. That greatly increased the acrimony of politics in the state.

Your point about Biden actually supports my point. Before southern Democrats rescued his campaign, the Act Blue donors and activists were running a carnival where candidates were all raising their hand to open borders. Trump didn’t run against Biden, he ran against those people. That’s only possible because New York and California Democrats have so much power over the party apparatus and messaging that it’s easy to make them the face of the party.

If the states were split up, that wouldn’t happen. My county exec is a Democrat, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about him because he’s a farmer. If folks in New York and California had no input into the laws that applied to me, or how my schools are run, etc., I don’t think I would follow politics at all.

It really seems like you're making the argument I said you were making, that Georgia Democrats are basically Republicans actually and that the Democrats ought to have run a Republican-lite Joe Manchin character (who would have gotten stomped), or, failing that, some wild-eyed left-coast radical (who would have gotten stomped), but instead the national and state parties colluded to run candidates who could actually win.

I'm struggling to understand how we go from that, to saying that there is even the remotest support in Georgia to secede even though every national candidate Georgians elected is in the party currently in power, or that after secession the elections would or should go back to Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only way any of that makes sense is if the actual goal is to separate the Georgia Democrats from the national apparatus to hopefully give state Republicans a chance to figuratively beat the newly-activated voters into submission. In fact if we're going strictly by the numbers then in any split Georgia should stay with the Democratic parts of the country.

Also I'm not sure what Pelosi has to do with any of this but at the moment, from the outside, the face of Georgia Democrats look like Ossoff, Warnock and Abrams all of whom are authentically local. I'm sure Trump and the Republican party would like people to think that Pelosi is the face of the Georgia Democrats, though.

I do feel bad for Georgian voters, not to mention the people counting the votes. It wasn't their fault that the balance of power came down to them in the end and I'm sure most of them didn't like being in the middle of that firestorm. However I suspect any acrimony was primarily due to the fact that the Democrats found a winning strategy in a formerly safe state.

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