Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis: "The fact that we're going to hold Joe Biden to one standard and Donald Trump to another, which is really no standard at all." - @JoeNBC on The New York Times et al.

"The fact that we're going to hold Joe Biden to one standard and Donald Trump to another, which is really no standard at all." - @JoeNBC on The New York Times et al.

Utterly unsurprising that Jim VandeHei then leaps to the defense of The New York Times.

Pool boy.

It's wild that VandeHei can go out and defend NYT for their coverage a few days after writing this about the threat from Trump.

yeah, that was such a smarmy and obvious rhetorical slight of hand in his answer

The NY Times is busy telling its readers today to feel bad about a Labour victory, because not enough people voted so it really doesn't count.

To be fair, Labour barely did better, in terms of vote share, than their catastrophic performance last election, and they did dramatically worse than 2017. Their victory was entirely driven by the complete collapse of the Tories and inability of the FPTP system to handle multiparty democracy.

It's hard to conceive of a more undemocratic system than what we in the US have, but a system in which the LD's 12.2% of the vote earns 11.8% of the seats, while Reform UK's (may they burn in a racist hell of their own design) 14.3% of the vote earns 0.8% of the seats is.. Not exactly democratic.

(and Labour, of course, got 69% of the seats with 34% of the vote)

It is democratic if your results are based on ridings and not nation-wide. You have to create a system in which you follow. FPTP is the system in the U.K. (like here in Canada). So that means, you are electing a representative and that person helps choose a PM. Is this the best system? I don't know.

But to say it is less democratic because we can tabulate all votes in all ridings in aggregate isn't convincing to me. We know who we are voting for to become PM. There is no mystery there. We are also choosing our rep. If you want to separate the two, fine.

It isn’t. Not by a long shot. Because in very many cases your vote is simply useless. And the seat percentages can vary wildly from the vote percentages.

Even within an individual riding... Take Chingford and Woodford Green, for example. There's no real argument that Iain Duncan Smith had majority or even plurality support, if the vote had not been divided between two Labour candidates. His victory did not reflect the will of the voters.

And that's entirely fair to say. But to also be fair, they won and I would be much more interested in what they will do. "Labour Won a U.K. Landslide. Why Doesn’t It Feel Like That?" is their analysis headline. I would have prepared "Labour Won a U.K. Landslide. Here is what they plan to do."

My entire concern is what people in power will do and how we as journalists can inform VOTERS so that they can make educated decisions as THE stakeholders of a nation. I care less about the colour in these moments -- and more about what I can expect.

Lol, that's a very NYT headline. Like, I don't have a lot of (any?) respect for Keir Starmer, but the Tories got *crushed* hard enough they should've "felt" the impact in their offices in NY... Write that up instead. "Tory party utterly humiliated." There's a headline - short, sweet, punchy.

Oh well. I just want to deal with facts. That's all. Tories lost bad. They were in power for 14 years. Had loads of scandals and sank the economy under Truss. That is usually it. I would love to know more about why only 20 per cent of the vote bothered to show up.

Fair enough. As I commented below, while there might be room for argument about the solidity of Labour's victory, the defeat of the Tories is both inarguable and very, very delicious.

Just a quick followup, I thought this was an excellent 'just the facts' summary of the election; lots of graphs showing both the remarkable tactical success and the underlying narrowness of the labour victory: www.theguardian.com/politics/art...

Labour put 'safe' seats at risk to target marginals. It paid off – but there’s a cost | Robert Fordwww.theguardian.com The party’s landslide victory on only 34% of the vote was a masterpiece of electoral Jenga. But the taller the tower, the weaker the base, writes Robert Ford

You are confusing FPTP with geographic constituencies with a single representative. You can get the exact same result with ranked choice voting and other systems as long as you there is only one seat for each district. Which is why some places use a party list for part of the legislature.

I think both are a problem; as I noted further downthread, there were plenty of individual constituencies that returned very unrepresentative results (I used the example of Chingford and Woodford Green, where a two-way labour split allowed the Tory to win with 34%). That's a FPTP problem.

They said the the same when Bush and Trump lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College. Oh, wait, no. No they did not.

Because their voters and conditions are different: Trump can say something racist and he will not have a lot of problems; if Biden said it, he would lose the election

there's nothing that says JoeNBC et al can't hold Trump to the same standard. quit bitching and go to work. the fucking guy stole from a charity. plus, plus, plus. Dems have a lot to work with. so work

There are no standards. No decorum. No guardrails. Quickly becoming a country of have and have nots. Zero middle class

When you lost Morning Joe

People have been (rightfully) calling for Trump to drop out since he came down than damned escalator.

you see Trump has immunity.

Standard Operating Procedure (right there in the name)

We’ve seen this poison well campaign before. It’s sad that so many intelligent people are falling for it again like it’s brand new. Here is an idea: the New York Times shills for Republicans and against Democrats. That’s been the trend since at least 2000 (and probably since 1979).

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