Also, hasn't gone to a republican in over 20 years....

Ah, well that's reasonable sounding. Perhaps the burden of understanding nuance of candidates is that you'll always be disappointed when it comes time to reconcile with millions of others.

This sentiment is really impractical in a functional democracy of over 300 million people, if you can't find anyone in 20 candidates that have run over the past 40 years from the two major parties you were willing to vote for.

Your perfect candidate that you hold out for isn't going to be the perfect candidate for a lot of people. Part of the whole give and take is building consensus around most broadly acceptable candidates, rather than just taking your ball and going home when none of the viable candidates perfectly suite you.

Not just the strategic value, but also the fact that the Netanyahu camp and allies will cry "antisemitism" in the face of any significant criticism, which could be disastrous for an election campaign.

Even funnier, the nominee will be set by that date either way. So the excuse doesn't even work to say they don't want to debate an uncertain nominee.

I presume it depends on the area you would be working with and what technologies you are working with. I assume it does better for some popular things that tend to be very verbose and tedious.

My experience including with a copilot trial has been like yours, a bit underwhelming. But I assume others must be getting benefit.

The duality of their situation.

You got the people who know the score and the true objective: To leverage a tenuous victorious position to tilt the scales persistently in their favor in a rather undemocratic way. For them, this is something to shut the hell up about and do on the down low.

Then you have the true believers, who think this is a plan to clean up some perceived "deep state" conspiracy to cheat the elections, and only fair to "fix" the problem that the popular voice is not being honored. Those are the folks that wanted a big ol website for it and to shout it from the rooftops.

Now of course, you'd think the true believers might get a bit rattled at the apparent eagerness to bury it and keep quiet and not tell the voters about it too much.

Didn't you see the movie Independency Day? Clearly it could be a huge asset for a US President.

Yes, you have the right wingers throwing out "whore" for no reason, for saying her mothers name should be enough to disqualify her...

Now these people are too far gone to get any hope of their vote to be sure, however I suspect milder versions of those sentiments lie perhaps even subconsiously in some moderate voters. They may feel vaguely "uncomfortable" and doubling down might just exacerbate that while a milquetoast white dude might alleviate that discomfort.

He was running against someone who also had vaguely credible military service, so there was room to discredit without blowback

It's harder to nitpick a military record when running a draft dodger as your candidate. Given that the GOP is "supposed" to be law and order, it should provide some challenge for them to be running a draft dodging felon against a prosecutor and ex-military ticket.

Cooper

Was curious why "less safe"? I was thinking that's a decent strategic pick, a southern democrat that's able to win the same elections that Trump and Robinson won, while still pretty well aligned with the democrat platform broadly. He has a good chance to immediately be 16 electoral votes, he has to vacate his governorship this year anyway, so you don't vacate a known factor in favor of a less known factor. Pandering to Pennsylvania may be a bit more likely with more bang for the buck though given that Pennsylvania has historically been more "winnable" and has more votes though..

Small sample size, but there's one pro-Trump civil war if no Trump guy I have actually seen in person, and he only recently left the military. So yes, I imagine there would be at least some military defectors.

Though I think the logistics would be more complicated in defecting, since thanks to constant instant communication and trivial travel, state identity is far more diluted than it was in the 19th century. Particularly in the military where they move members around like crazy. So any given military unit is unlikely to be all-in on civil war across the board, and hopefully less likely to defect if it means turning on their own unit.

Though Palin kind of twisted it right back to W-ism, but even more so.

Well that and he's an incredibly charismatic person, exceptionally well spoken and handled himself well in almost all public engagements.

So I don't agree with this blame game, but in order to limit the scope of this to EU, they would have had to maintain two different designs, so it just makes sense to change the global design to suit the EU agreement. If it were something like bundling, then that's light enough to maybe change regionally, but it's too much to maintain a whole other kernel architecture.

Happens all the time with regulations. For example my company doesn't have different products to comply with different environmental regulations, they just compose the strictest superset of the international regulations and follow those. California passes a law and it may change the global strategy.

I think there's at least some sincere grass roots effort to overcome the feared challenges of a last minute campaign.

The thing is in the wake of the 2022 elections, it seemed briefly like the GOP might actually grow a pair and throw the Donald under the bus for screwing up what they thought should have been a cakewalk. And they came back, even though he lost in 2020, his taint spoiled 2022, but they hope that he will take it in 2024.

If he loses yet again, then I imagine GOP will finally just start expelling Trump and his minions hard.

Yeah, I'm not able to recall a successful ticket where both candidates were "exceptional". I still think whatever chances McCain might have had were blown when he went with Palin as a VP to try to sate the extra crazy wing of his party. Trump's choice to do Vance seems like a strategic failure. Tim Scott must be mad that he crawled all the way up Trump's ass for nothing when everyone speculated that Trump would try to pander to the black vote with a token black VP.

Yeah, I could see how that could be an impediment to a campaign, but practically speaking, if he is the governor: -Bill comes in, he vetoes, the veto gets overridden, the governor didn't matter.

So whether he nixes it or Robinson rubber stamps it, the practical end result is the same. The optics may not be as good, but he's hit his term limit anyway and I think his supporters would rather see an NC politician on the national stage instead of him looking marginally better doing symbolic vetoes.

I too marvel that Robinson won the same election that Cooper won. I can't fathom the voting public that would make that split choice. The districted elections were mangled to explain the state congress and the US house, but the fact that the statewide went "Tillis, Robinson, Trump, and Cooper" I just will never understand.

On the downside, he's relatively unknown on the national stage.

On the upside, it's a natural progression, he served as governor for a full term and the timing is right to move on to the next political field.

To add to your points, he's a democrat who won the same exact elections in a state that Trump also won both times, a state that simultaneously elected republican supermajorities and a republican lieutenant governor while still electing him. A straight white southern man who is about as nonthreatening to GOP sensibilities as you can get without actually being a republican.