do i understand correctly that the US elections turned out really freaking good. the government system confuses me a bit
#noretr
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@ilyamikcoder in addition, the senate majority predicted right now (52 + bernie sanders and angus king, who are not democrats, but independent progressives) is better than the one the democrats had under joe biden in 2022 (and they didn't have one in 2020 at all), meaning that they are way less vulnerable to some john fetterman or kirsten synema deciding "i don't want to do what the rest of my party does"
@ilyamikcoder the democrats still won't get to do a lot of lawmaking on the federal level, because trump can veto laws and vetoes require a 2/3 support to overcome, but they now get to block trump's agenda, get investigative powers to reveal his and his cronies' dirty dealings and so on
but also, aside from the federal level, a lot of state and local elections likewise went blue, and that is going to matter a lot to people living in these areas
@ilyamikcoder yes, basically
they have two chambers in their legislature: the house of representatives and the senate
the house is elected by dividing each state into areas roughly proportionate to population and running elections once every two years, whoever wins each individual area's majority gets the seat
it's weak to gerrymandering (it's typically state legislatures that draw the district boundaries, and they can draw them in a way that would benefit their own majority party*), but also more representative of the population as a whole
the senate gives each of the 50 states two seats, and a third of it is elected every 2 years (so each senator gets a 6 year term) -- it's less representative, with big states like california, texas and new york getting same representations as small ones like wyoming and vermont, but also more resistant to gerrymandering, because the election covers the whole state
* though with gerrymandering, parties have to switch from having few "safe" seats to having lots of "close-enough" seats -- which some argue has hurt republicans in this election, because if enough people decide to vote differently, suddenly those "close-enough" seats flip to another party instead