If so, it doesn’t show up in voting records or rhetoric.

Problem with that view is that minority of the Democrats were bought off, like about 4%. And they had a hard time winning reelection as a result

I generally avoid painting them all with a single brush like that.

Some absolutely are bought off like you describe. But an awful lot are not — the big problem we’ve had is that the contingent of the bought off Democrats plus the Republicans has been enough to block meaningful action, even when the Democrats have had a nominal majority.

Yeah. Most of the Alaska population is not registered to vote as either a Republican or as a Democrat

It takes more than that — people just resort to conspiracy theories. What the mind-changing process actually looks like:

• distancing from ideological community
• desire to seek out new information
• and solidifying experiences of gradual or epiphanic realization

I see that there are some 76,000 other registered Democrats in the state besides you. Probably worth starting to get active with your local Democratic club or party, and starting the kind of outreach that can start to change things.

And those lower prices result in…burning more

Because we don’t have the kind organizing that sparks riots. We have a bunch of nonviolent civil disobedience instead.

It will probably take a bit longer than that. For example, catalytic converters don’t suddenly get removed from cars.

The very richest are — but the professional class, which can shell out $3000 every few years, isn’t. And the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is almost exactly a billion dollars. It’s still very doable for Democrats to raise the kind of money it takes to be competitive.

My impression is that Krugman has been there since 2015. Did a scan through some of his old columns, like this one:

The point is that we shouldn’t ask whether the G.O.P. will eventually nominate someone in the habit of saying things that are demonstrably untrue, and counting on political loyalists not to notice. The only question is what kind of scam it will be.

Meanwhile, the Republican plan is to get rid of the subsidies for nuclear to give tax cuts to billionaires:

Repeal Title I of IRA ( Excluding: 45Q Carbon Sequestration, 45U Nuclear Power, 45Z Clean Fuels, and EV Tax Credit)

$404.7 billion in 10-year savings

VIABILITY: HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW

• Reducing 45Q, 45U, and 45Z would streamline and reduce government intervention in the energy industry that props up the green energy sector and distorts market competition .

They’re clearly trying to protect somebody. Wish I knew.

They don’t have the votes in either house of Congress to actually stop anything. Rhetoric is all they’ve got; what they can do is to make it super-clear how awful Trump’s decision-making is, so that there’s a chance voters will turn out and give them the power to act in the future.

He’s down to backing out of stuff from the LBJ era

The key problem is that whether he is confirmed depends entirely on whether the Republicans all vote to confirm him. The most that the Democrats can actually do is make a bunch of noise.

They should be courting the public by making it really clear how awful Trump’s nominees and policies are.

We actually did it once. People hated it.

Different religious groups are different in meaningful ways and religion is basically a toolkit for organizing.

A lot of the individual Democrats are worth paying attention to, and either have state-level power or maybe the capacity to sow enough discord among Republicans to block some actions in Congress