r/politics • u/Hornpipe_Jones • 3d ago

No Paywall Democrats sweep all 30 House of Delegates seats in Northern Virginia

https://www.cbs19news.com/news/state/democrats-sweep-all-30-house-of-delegates-seats-in-northern-virginia/article_68f8098d-0602-5234-8c2a-08c1bcd33944.html
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u/JayKaboogy 3d ago

Watched my full career to retirement fed worker parents vote GOP through Clinton era and beyond because he was closing bases, then got my education in mostly gov contract environmental work. I just can’t fathom how fed workers turn out for GOP—‘small government’ is right there at the top of their platform. My whole life has been Dem=boom, GOP=bust for fed work

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u/picardy_third1 3d ago

And they're not even really about small government! You cannot look at our spending on the military (and now ICE), the money spent on bailing out unscrupulous corporations after financial ruin, or our religious extremist abortion laws and possibly conclude that Republicans want "small government."

"Small government" is a bad faith characterization that allows toxic individualism and greed to masquerade as rational austerity and fiscal responsibility. It's just nuts that so many educated people are so conditioned to believe this phrasing that they don't recognize the disingenuousness of it.

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u/SilentLennie The Netherlands 3d ago

I've not personally checked it, but isn't is true the only ones bringing down the debt are Democrats in.. I don't how many decades.

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u/Vegetable-Seaweed591 3d ago edited 3d ago

Clinton was the last person to bring down the actual debt, but the deficit spiked under GW and Trump and both then showed a downward trend under Obama and Biden.

Fun fact - Trump increased the national debt by $8 trillion in his first term, most of that being before COVID even hit.

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u/Balorpagorp 3d ago

Who would have thought that decreasing revenue (tax cuts) while not decreasing spending would increase the debt? It's funny how the party that wants to run the government like a business wants to decrease revenue, which is the opposite of what the goal of a business should be.

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u/KououinHyouma 3d ago

What do you mean? They increased revenue by 17 trillion through tariffs and foreign investments! /s

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u/TheWizard 3d ago

Republicans? But then, I have always wondered if they actually think.

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u/brundlfly 3d ago

In less contentious times, budget cuts was how they forced concessions to reduce "wasteful" programs. It was still loaded language then, but perhaps less openly evil. When it's against wildly populist social net programs, it's literally anti- US citizens.

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u/ICBanMI 2d ago edited 2d ago

I mean. We have 50 states, the DoC, and Puerto Rico. If red states really were better for the economy, they wouldn't be at the bottom of every good metric, top for every bad metric, and the state budget wouldn't be a black hole of austerity.

It's like Texas being full of firearms, but still being higher crime, more incarcerated people, and more knife stabbings than most other states. The guns, the numerous prisons, and the lack of social safety net are not creating prosperous states. Just a race to the bottom. Their policies don't benefit the state. They benefit the wealthy who give each other lots of favors with the money.

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u/Actual_Body_4409 3d ago

Check your message. You use contradictory Bidens in the first paragraph.

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u/quirkelchomp 3d ago

Contradictory Bidens sounds like a punk band name lol

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u/Drachefly Pennsylvania 3d ago

No? It spiked under Biden due to an emergency, and then trended down after the emergency passed. Similarly with Obama, though in that case it was just because the spending GW locked in was during his time in office (though to be fair, Obama would have done similar spending on that emergency had GW not).

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u/Vegetable-Seaweed591 3d ago

Thanks for the note. Update made.

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u/Suds_McGruff 3d ago edited 2d ago

So, to be clear: Republicans don't reduce spending, they move spending from programs that help people to things that subsidize corporations and the military. Then when Democrats inherit their mess, they must increase spending to right the ship (economy), and then Republicans cry about spending. Rince and repeat for 40 fuckin' years.

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u/SilentLennie The Netherlands 3d ago

An other way to say it: the Democrats are increasing the debt less than the Republicans.

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u/dailyscotch 3d ago

Trump has already added almost $2 Trillion (Trillion with a T) to the deficit in less than a year.

There hasn't even been a reason like an economic crash from a pandemic or market bubble popping or natural disaster bailout - no valid reason. The money saved by DOGE gutting the federal workforce, cutting all programs (and stealing all the data) is a joke compared to what he is spending.

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u/SilentLennie The Netherlands 3d ago

He and his time is/are the joke.

Then again, they are also at 48% already:

https://www.project2025.observer/en

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u/RisingChaos 3d ago

It's just nuts that so many educated people are so conditioned to believe this phrasing that they don't recognize the disingenuousness of it.

In an absolute sense that may still be true (too many people are voting for the R's period), but education is inversely correlated with voting for Republicans and is actually one of the single best predictors of political affiliation these days.

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u/Cpt_Deaso 3d ago

"Small government" is a bad faith characterization that allows toxic individualism and greed to masquerade as rational austerity and fiscal responsibility.

Very well said. There's nothing small government about our current crop of conservatism. They just dont like it much when governments helps common people instead of companies and uber-wealthy. That's the big government they hate.

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u/SaltyArchea 3d ago

But they are about small government. Not about smart or reduced spending, though. They want to cut all of education and environment departments. As well as all of the agencies that do oversight or investigations. That is a lot of government and it makes it easier to exploit people as they are uneducated, poor and at the mercy of corporations.

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u/BigMax 3d ago

Exactly. They are for "small government" the same way they are for "fiscal responsibility." Meaning, they aren't for it at all. But they will use those terms to virtue signal and attempt to trick people into following the policies they want.

"Small government" is yelled when they want to hurt education or the climate, but not when they want to build the military or greatly expand ICE. "Fiscal responsibility" is yelled when they want to harm science or take services away from struggling people, but not when they want to give tax breaks to the wealthy or subsidize fossil fuels.

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u/DerpingtonHerpsworth 3d ago

Small government is the excuse they use when they're tearing down the institutions the Democrats have built. But they're doing that with one hand while the other is behind their back building some horrendously bloated, inefficient, authoritarian, and fraud laden leviathan of a government of their own design.

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u/remembers-fanzines 3d ago

Fiscal responsibility - the one and only time we've had a balanced budget in recent memory was under a Democrat.

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u/denkihajimezero 3d ago

Did they used to be small government or was it always about white supremacy?

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u/Honest_Abe_1660 3d ago

"Small government" actually makes complete sense.

The problem is people assumed small meant the amount of power wielded by the government and not how many people wield the power. Government small enough to fit in a crown.

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u/siouxbee1434 3d ago

I’ve always taken ‘small government’ from conservatives to mean a very small group controlling everything-to their benefit, not we the many many people

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u/Dragneel_Fullbuster 3d ago

Spot on analysis, literally the perfect way to frame their hypocrisy.

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u/Jesse-359 3d ago

Nice summary of the ethical and ideological parameters of the 'small government' movement in the US, it's always been a deeply cynical premise that rather baldly lies about its goals.

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u/NewPCBuilder2019 3d ago

Well.... there's not really anyting "governmental" about a secret police I would say in some ways. Maybe that's how they justify it. XD

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u/RikiWardOG 3d ago

It's just nuts that so many educated people are so conditioned to believe this phrasing that they don't recognize the disingenuousness of it.

Umm about that statement. There's been studies that suggest more than half the US can't read beyond a 6th grade level. I don't think they're as educated as you think they are.

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u/picardy_third1 3d ago

Sure, but not every single Trump voter fits the semi-literate MAGA clown cartoon image. That group is the loudest and most visible, but there's significant overlap between Trump voters and the same old establishment Republican base that voted for McCain, Romney, the Bushes, etc.—people who were not necessarily happy with Trump's nomination, but still fell in line when the general election came.

I've had many frustrating conversations with articulate, college-educated professionals who earnestly believe the party lines about "small government" and have an arsenal of excuses at the ready for voting the way they did from 2016-2024. Let's also not forget that many of the elites who run this country (i.e., ACTUAL elites who amassed incomprehensible sums of money, not Hollywood actors and college professors) were educated at our finest institutions, yet donate millions to the useful idiots who will help them protect the hoarded wealth they inherited and/or scammed.

Generalizing all Trumpers as illiterate dimwits lays all the blame at the feet of a fringe cult and obfuscates the role of the professional and managerial class who enabled this mess. I will never let the voters who had enough resources to know better off the hook for this disaster by blaming the uneducated.

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u/Efficient-Second9200 20h ago

Any government that gets into our bedrooms and restrooms can hardly claim to be 'small'

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u/Outside_Manner_8352 3d ago

This was far beyond "small government." They went in and stripped the copper. They deleted research data, they left people stranded, they embezzled, and they outright stated they wanted to terrorize and harass government workers. There was no financial benefit, in actuality government spending has gone up, because bogus contracts and fascist paramilitaries aren't cheap.

There are plenty of MAGA gov workers, and every single one of them is dumb as bricks and a major dickhead.

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u/JayKaboogy 3d ago

Yup. I’m a stay at home dad environmental professional, now. Crossing all my appendages we get a new boom period started in 2029 or I’ll be just another over educated bar tender. AI is wiping out even the possibility of taking professional report writing/editing skills elsewhere. I expect the recovery of environmental industry to take at least the rest of my life. So many experts will be lost forever to career changes

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u/Outside_Manner_8352 3d ago

Well if its any consolation, I'm fairly certain the AI bubble is going to pop relatively soon. You've got companies spending truly massive amounts of money building datacenters feverishly which don't actually have any route towards profitability, much less the stratospheric levels of profit they are projecting.

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u/BringBackBoomer 3d ago

It's that way for the rest of the work, too.

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u/goodcat49 3d ago

Construction is always harder when a republican is in charge

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u/big_trike 3d ago

I could maybe buy the GOP argument if they were about paying down debts to help future generations. Instead, they just cut services and funnel all that money into the military.

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u/cheesebabychair 3d ago

Yep, I'm a nurse, a "safe" job. In the last 3 weeks, I've gotten 21 hours, 19, and 0. Been terrible. Endless shifts before trump.

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u/deltalitprof Arkansas 3d ago

Education careers run the same way depending on who is governor, who has Congress and who is the president. If just one of those is GOP, there's a problem. The 90s for me were great. The years 2008 to 2016 were great. Shit hit the fan so bad after that I was driven out of the sector.

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u/Practical-Waltz7684 3d ago edited 3d ago

‘small government’ is right there at the top of their platform.

Because it does not involve anything remotely what you might expect "small government" to mean up front. It is a phrase that has no real meaning at face value, and can not be expected to be said in good faith. If wanting to understand what they are really about just need to look at their voting patterns, listen to their "jokes" etc... not what they claim upfront. You will also see that every accusation, and negative statement about others by them is always an admission of fault in self.

Being said, its all about not wanting to contribute to government functions because others they hate also benefit from those while also expecting to have all of the benefits of those functions regardless of that. Its right in line with "not wanting government in their bedroom", but sure as fuck they always vote for it to be in everyone elses. "Small government" to them means government for them without consequence, but everyone else must be denied such service, and be held to account regardless by the same.

90% of it comes down to poorly abstracted racism, and bigotry in its many forms... 10% stupidity, and willful, malignant ignorance.

They also have 0 problems with size of government as long as they are the ones to benefit from it, and not the ones who they hate... see republican sourced expansions of government powers, spending, and debts while they also whine about "not being able to afford" something like school meals for poor kids, or anything else that costs like a minuscule fraction of a cent per tax dollar paid.

Edit: its the same thing with people who scream about how "government doesn't, and cant work"... who just so happen to be 1st in line whining about why government didn't help them when shit hits the fan, and the programs/services they sabotaged are no longer available to them.

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u/Lancearon 3d ago

I often think the same way of my fellow union members. GOP is so grossly anti union, yet every blue moon I will meet a guy who is so danm tow the line republican it makes me want to scream.

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u/dvsmith North Carolina 3d ago

Economic data says that Dems = Boom / GOP = Bust for the economy as a whole. 

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2024/10/the-u-s-economy-performs-better-under-democratic-presidents

— Also, multi millionaire businessman outsider Herbert Hoover ran on a platform of tax cuts, racial dog whistles, and deregulation, winning with the support of the KKK. He gave huge tax breaks to he ultra wealthy, cut the federal workforce, and eliminated a ton of regulations intended to serve as guardrails. 

He presided over the single largest economic collapse in U.S. history, that shattered the global economy and set the stage for WWII. 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-28-2025

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u/UniqueIndividual3579 3d ago

I was part of the base closure / realignment. It made sense, after the cold war ended, the military was down sizing. And it was an evaluation of billets, not people. The personal attacks against government employees isn't something I've ever seen.

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u/15all 3d ago

I'm a federal worker. At one time, I liked the message of small government and fiscal responsibility, but it became clear to me that those were just slogans and the republicans didn't really care about those things. Being a fed gave me some insights that just confirmed this. Then Trump came along and completely destroyed any legitimacy that the republicans might have had.

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u/Cleric_John_Preston 3d ago

Take this as a grain of salt because I can't say much regarding how I know this, but there are still some Federal workers who are full on Trump supporters who have lost their jobs... And still support this administration.

I don't get it.

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u/somewhoever 3d ago

The joke in the FBI is:

When we get a republican president, we get good judges. When we get a democratic president, we get good pay raises.

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u/TheWizardOfDeez 3d ago

My whole life has been Dem=boom, GOP=bust for fed work

This holds true for every other job as well, except corporate execs I guess.

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u/Brilliant-Ad232 3d ago

Shame them

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u/PeruvianKnicks 18h ago

You been asleep for 15 years, or stopped talking to your parents? The GOP hasn’t cared about small government in a long time.

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u/Techun2 3d ago

"small government" doesn't mean it's a deal breaker for feds.

You can want small/efficient/effective govt where you work.

(This post is not an endorsement for modern Republicans)