Hello. I'm a member of election twitter and I have some things I want to say about the community. There has been growing discontent for a while and I feel like everyone knows it but no one wants to admit it.

Some of our most prominent members have been supporting extremely toxic behaviors. We have let our own political bias get in the way of the fun of election analysis. Now it's impossible to totally remove your bias I get that. But flagrant and open partisanship?

Niles is a good example of this. He is so visibly biased in his forecasting and maps that I'm surprised this hasn't come to bite him sooner. It's one thing to get things like #CA25 wrong or the Kansas Senate Primary, we've all made bad calls and done bad maps.

Yet this happens all the time. If you have any complaints about him he acts condescending and if you criticize him which you absolutely can people go out of their way to defend him. It's bred a culture of silence where if you have anything to say you can't say it publicly.

He's had a hard life, I get that, several members of the community have, it doesn't excuse tweet stealing and generally being an asshole to accounts who are far smaller than you and may even look up to you.

We mock people like Red Eagle Politics (and you absolutely can he is terrible) for partisanship and bad takes but when it's one of the big shots we just let it slide. He constantly gets stuff wrong but because we prop him up we just saw him get off MSNBC.

Miles is complacent in this as well by giving his de facto endorsement of this behavior and by contributing to the culture of silence by defending Niles when he is clearly wrong.

We drove out Speaker McCormick for the fake poll but we let Jackson back in with open arms because he's young? What he did was wrong and he conspired with McCormack to do a fake poll that got picked up by outside outlets. It's 1000 wonders his parents haven't been sued.

Yet we just accept this behavior, and if you have a problem with it you are bullied into silence by bigger accounts.

It's nice to have debates and to talk elections, it's nice to make fun maps and to have them shared, but what's not nice is the culture of conformity.

Things have gotten so bad that people like @ElectionBabe who founded this community have talked about leaving because of the toxicity and the ideological segregation. We are not just a small group of online friends anymore. We are a community.

We have progressive mappers, center left, center right, full blown MAGA. Everyone is in theory welcome but unless you conform to a certain mindset you will not succeed for long. It's a part of this toxic mindset that we have developed as a community.

I don't think anyone is doing this with malicious intent. I think most just want to protect their friends and maybe help them along the way. But I feel like I can't say anything about this on my main account without being totally shunned and belittled.

After I get done with this thread I will never be on this account again. I entirely just want to raise awareness about the way I know many of us are feeling in the community.