The Democratic Party label is officially TOXIC. 
There’s no question that he is going to take a ton of Democrats with him. It’s also going to free up those moderate Republican who are not buying MAGA.
He's a Democrat trying to appeal to Liz Cheney Republicans.
And they might run 
we are so fucked.
article
DETROIT (AP) — Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, a longtime Democrat, says he will run for Michigan governor as an independent in 2026.
“It’s clear to me that there are a lot of people in this country who are tired of both parties and tired of the system,” Duggan said in an interview Tuesday. “And so I want to offer people a choice.”
Duggan, 66, is credited by many for leading Detroit after it emerged from bankruptcy to become a thriving, more vibrant city. He formally announced his intentions in a video released Wednesday morning but discussed his future before that with The Associated Press. He hopes to succeed popular Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is term-limited under Michigan law.
The mayor’s decision comes in the midst of a reckoning for Democrats in Michigan, one of a handful of swing states that helped propel former President Donald Trump to victory in November. The Democratic Party, which only two years previously had claimed a majority in both houses of the Legislature for the first time in decades, suffered setbacks at the ballot box that left state Democrats scrambling for explanations and a path forward.
Still, few would have anticipated the mayor of the state’s largest city and biggest Democratic stronghold abandoning his party altogether.
Duggan said he felt he could govern more effectively as an independent.
“You have a (state) legislature that’s almost evenly divided that makes the stakes of each issue become magnified,” he said. “It has gotten harder and harder to address things as the partisan climate has gotten more toxic.”
Duggan also could be looking to avoid what is shaping up as a crowded Democratic primary field. Among the potential contenders are Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist III and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who relocated to Michigan in 2022, has also sparked speculation about a potential Democratic gubernatorial bid. When asked by the AP on Nov. 3 about a potential candidacy, Buttigieg left the door open.
On the Republican side, prospective candidates include Michigan Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt, former state Attorney General Mike Cox, former state Rep. Tom Leonard and U.S. Rep. John James. Tudor Dixon, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 2022, is also considering another run.
Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes said in a statement that the potential Democratic primary field for governor is “incredibly strong” and that the party looks forward to ensuring it holds onto the office. Gov. Whitmer’s office declined to comment Wednesday.
“This changes the dynamic of the campaigns for governor,” said Adolph Mongo, a Detroit-based political commentator and former political consultant. “There have been rumblings from folks that we need a third party, a real one.”
“This is a gutsy move. This is a good move,” Mongo continued. “It hurts the Democratic Party. There’s no question that he is going to take a ton of Democrats with him. It’s also going to free up those moderate Republican who are not buying MAGA.”
Democrat Mark Bernstein, a regent at the University of Michigan, also says running as an independent will allow Duggan “to lead free from partisan entanglements that have paralyzed Lansing for a long time.”
“Voters do not care about political parties. They care about results and Mayor Duggan gets results,” Bernstein said.
“I do believe that many voters, like me, feel homeless, right now,” Bernstein continued. “Many Republicans feel estranged from the Republican Party and many Democrats feel alienated by the Democratic Party.”
Republican and former Michigan Lt. Gov. Brian Calley said on X that Duggan checks the boxes of being a “credible, independent candidate with the ability to raise money.”
“But there are huge advantages of having a political party behind you,” Calley wrote. “And being a target of the left and the right will be intense. 2026 is already very interesting.”
A Duggan run as an independent, while it further fractures a state Democratic Party still reeling from Trump’s win in November, could win over voters looking outside the party for answers.
There is precedent. Then-U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona made the move in 2022 to independent. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin did the same last spring. Several states have elected independent governors since 1990, Duggan noted, including Angus King in Maine, now a U.S. senator.
But an independent has never served as Michigan governor and third-party candidates typically don’t fare well in elections for the state’s top seat. Libertarian Party candidate Mary Buzuma received a scant 0.9% of the vote in 2022.
Duggan must collect between 12,000 and 60,000 signatures from registered Michigan voters, ensuring at least 100 signatures from registered voters in at least seven of the state’s 13 congressional districts.
“If you think the two-party system is serving you well, you can vote for your Republican or Democratic candidate,” Duggan said. “But if you think the only way we can really change the quality of life in Michigan is a different way, I’m going to give people the alternative, an independent who is going to go to Lansing and work with responsible leadership in both parties.”
Last month, Duggan announced that the coming year would be his last as Detroit’s mayor. His current term ends in January 2026. Duggan said he then plans to ”go to communities across the state that have been forgotten and sit in neighborhood restaurants and farmhouses and city centers and listen to people.”
Duggan spent about eight years as chief executive of the Detroit Medical Center. He served three years as Wayne County prosecutor and 14 years as deputy county executive.
He was the top vote-getter in Detroit’s 2013 mayoral primary despite running a write-in campaign due to a ballot challenge. Duggan, who is white, was elected in November 2013 to lead mostly Black Detroit which that summer was taken into the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history by a state-appointed manager.
Long-term debt of $18 billion or more and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual budget deficits left Detroit broke and nearly broken. Crime was high and neighborhood blight was rampant. Unemployment and poverty rates were among the nation’s highest.
Taking office in January 2014, Duggan ran the city but initially had no control over spending. By that December, Detroit had emerged from bankruptcy with about $7 billion in debt erased or restructured.
Over the past decade, Detroit routinely has had balanced city budgets and surpluses. Violent crime is down and neighborhoods mostly are cleaner. Detroit’s population even increased slightly in 2023. It was the first uptick since the 1950s when 1.8 million people called the city home.
Tell them that Snopes fact check said it's true
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dnc-attendees-covering-ears-gaza/
the fuck is that party, 5 in 10 being happy with cheney
HOW CAN ANYONE BE THIS DAFT
https://archive.is/lbWKO By Michael C. Bender Nov. 11, 2024Updated 3:17 p.m. ET
Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump, according to a New York Times analysis of preliminary election data.
The numbers help fill in the picture of Mr. Trump’s commanding victory, showing it may not represent the resounding endorsement of his agenda that the final Electoral College vote suggests. Mr. Trump won the White House not only because he turned out his supporters and persuaded skeptics, but also because many Democrats sat this election out, presumably turned off by both candidates.
Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden. The nation’s most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional 1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete.
The drop-off spanned demographics and economics. It was clear in counties with the highest job growth rates, counties with the most job losses and counties with the highest percentage of college-educated voters. Turnout was down, too, across groups that are traditionally strong for Democrats — including areas with large numbers of Black Christians and Jewish voters.
The decline in key cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, made it exceptionally difficult for Ms. Harris to win the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The drop-off is an extraordinary shift for Democrats, who, motivated by Mr. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, had turned out in eye-popping numbers for the three subsequent elections. They clipped his power in Washington in 2018, removed him from office in 2020 and defeated many of his handpicked candidates for battleground races in 2022.
Democrats said they need a new way to re-engage voters who are fatigued by the anti-Trump message and distrustful of both parties.
The reasons behind the drop-off are varied. For one, some backsliding could be expected after the record turnout in 2020, which was aided by pandemic rule changes that increased mail voting.
Some analysts point out that Ms. Harris was simply the latest political casualty of a postpandemic global trend favoring challengers, no matter the incumbents’ politics, in places like Japan, South Africa, South Korea and Britain.
But narrow results in swing states indicate that Democrats had an opportunity to turn back Mr. Trump once again. Some party officials said Ms. Harris did not have enough time to overhaul the campaign after taking over for Mr. Biden, whose popularity has plunged since his 2020 win.
Others were more critical of her messaging, suggesting the campaign was chasing ghosts in trying to appeal to Republican crossover voters by campaigning with conservatives like Liz Cheney and talking about threats to democracy. Instead, these people said, the Harris campaign should have spent more time talking about how her economic policies would affect an important, but disaffected, part of her party.
Structural differences between the Republican and Democratic operations may have played a role, too. The Harris campaign, flush with cash, relied on a traditional turnout program that stationed field staff members in campaign offices across the battleground map. To some degree, the data suggest that program worked; Ms. Harris won more voters than Mr. Biden in four of the six battleground states where the count is nearly complete. But that increase was swamped by Mr. Trump’s gains.
The former president seized on new federal election rulings that, for the first time, let campaigns directly coordinate with outside groups focused on pushing voters to the polls. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, poured $175 million into canvassers for America PAC, whose team effectively took its marching orders from the Trump campaign. Editors’ Picks A Union Square Date Night for Inter-Borough Relationships Don’t Say ‘Macbeth’ and Other Strange Rituals of the Theater World Are Seed Oils Actually Bad for You?
“It’s really a question of playbooks,” said Donna Brazile, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “Trump had edgier and stronger material that he was constantly communicating at rallies, on podcasts and in other appearances. Democrats tried to compete in seven battleground states and call it a day.”
In Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize on the battleground map, Mr. Trump’s victory received an outsize boost from an unlikely place — the five counties with the highest percentage of registered Democrats: Allegheny, Delaware, Lackawanna, Montgomery and Philadelphia.
Ms. Harris won these counties, but not by the margins needed to overcome Republican-heavy areas of the state. Total turnout was down from 2020 in all five Democratic strongholds, which could partly explain how Ms. Harris received 78,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes to his total in these same counties.
This gap left Ms. Harris with little chance of winning Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump’s victory margin in the state, as of Sunday, was about 145,000 votes.
In Wisconsin, the voter participation rate overall was among the highest of any state. But voters in Democratic-heavy counties simply could not keep pace with gains from their Republican counterparts.
In the eight counties that include Milwaukee, Madison and the surrounding suburbs, Ms. Harris surpassed the Biden totals by about 20,000 votes. But Mr. Trump gained about the same. In the rest of Wisconsin, Democrats were drubbed.
In Michigan, Mr. Trump’s victory was mainly a result of the drop-off in Wayne County, home to Detroit and diverse suburbs like Dearborn and Hamtramck that supply the state with its most significant source of Democratic votes.
While Ms. Harris easily won Wayne County, she did it with 61,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden had, a decline of about 10 percent, while Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes, a jump of about 9 percent.
That swing limited Ms. Harris’s hopes of winning Michigan, where Mr. Trump was ahead by about 81,000 votes.
Branden Snyder, a liberal organizer in Detroit, said he had conversations with other activists in the final weeks of the race about how strange they thought it was for Ms. Harris to bring Ms. Cheney, a former Republican House member from Wyoming, on the campaign trail in Detroit. Many progressive voters in the city viewed Ms. Harris as a centrist, he said, and they may have been better served hearing from a fellow liberal who could explain why they should be excited to support the vice president.
He said he vividly recalled realizing that Democrats were in trouble during the final weekend of the race when he was knocking on doors on the east side of Detroit and he could not find a way to persuade a middle-aged Black woman to cast her ballot. Black women have long been some of the Democratic Party’s most reliable voters.
“When you have Black women not voting because they say nothing is going to happen — that neither candidate is going to change anything — that is doomsday for Democrats,” Mr. Snyder said. A Nationwide Trend
The warning bells are ringing for Democrats well beyond the battlegrounds. Ms. Harris won fewer votes than Mr. Biden in 36 of 47 states. (Results remained incomplete on Sunday in Alaska, Arizona and California.)
In predominantly urban counties nationwide where most votes had been counted, Ms. Harris received two million fewer votes than Mr. Biden had four years earlier. Overall votes in these counties were down by about 1.7 million.
The trend was especially striking in Cook County, Ill., home to Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city. Overall turnout there was down by 20 percent. Mr. Trump collected about his same 2020 total vote, but Ms. Harris’s total was more than 417,000 votes behind Mr. Biden’s.
In the nation’s suburbs, however, there was clearer evidence that Mr. Trump had successfully persuaded Biden voters to flip. Turnout in predominantly suburban counties held steady from 2020, but Ms. Harris drew about 940,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden, while Mr. Trump added 1.3 million votes.
In counties where at least 40 percent of white adults hold a college degree, total turnout declined by about 230,000 votes, or 3 percent, from 2020. Ms. Harris won 271,000 fewer votes in such places, while Mr. Trump added 61,000.
In Texas, the party’s decade-long dream of turning it blue suffered a significant setback. While total turnout was about the same as four years ago, Ms. Harris won about 450,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump enhanced his margin by 485,000 votes.
In New Jersey, where Democratic presidential candidates typically win by about 15 percentage points, Ms. Harris won by just five points. It was the narrowest margin in more than three decades, when then-Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas outlasted President George H.W. Bush by two percentage points.
This year in New Jersey, total turnout was down by about 442,000 votes, just shy of the decline of 475,000 votes for Ms. Harris from Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump, once again, made gains despite a decrease in turnout, lifting his total in the state by 26,000 votes.
roughly my face reading some quotes here. There is truly well of unbound optimism and naivety in americans
this person does an inverse 
I saw #Recount2024 trending and ... yeah. Blue MAGA everyone.
The top reasons voters gave for not supporting Harris were that inflation was too high (+24), too many immigrants crossed the border (+23), and that Harris was too focused on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class (+17).
Other high-testing reasons were that the debt rose too much under the Biden-Harris Administration (+13), and that Harris would be too similar to Joe Biden (+12).
These concerns were similar across all demographic groups, including among Black and Latino voters, who both selected inflation as their top problem with Harris. For swing voters who eventually chose Trump, cultural issues ranked slightly higher than inflation (+28 and +23, respectively).
The lowest-ranked concerns were that Harris wasn’t similar enough to Biden (-24), was too conservative (-23), and was too pro-Israel (-22).
We have a lot of work to do. The general public doesn't understand their own economic system and blames everyone except Capitalists for their eggs costing $5 instead of $2.
Also those numbers around "Israel" and Palestine... 
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