While that’s true, even Trump will throw a few hollow words in support of other Republicans and declare himself a Republican and knows the result is his life is easier with Republicans victories.

In a hypothetical cheating scenario, it’s not like Trump directly did the cheating, some broad conspiracy across multiple states would require a number of players, coordinated since the “evidence” is similar dropoff across many states. Any such conspiracy would doubtless recognize the strategic value of allies also winning, even if they didn’t care about the allies directly. Such a conspiracy would be keyed into the same sentiment that wants to do everything they can to install conservative loyalists across the executive and judicial branches as quickly as they can. There’s no way such a conspiracy would neglect legislators and state governments if they had given themselves that opportunity.

The drop offs could be explained much more simply that MAGA is only about Trump and not about Republicans. If Trump only cares about Trump, the same can be said if his followers. Most of them will vote R as long as they are filling out a ballot anyway, but they barely even show up for Trump loyalists in the midterms. So it’s quite reasonable to expect a bunch of Trump people to just go in for the one thing they care about and ignore the rest.

The governor is easy to explain, the Republican candidate was never well liked, and then it came out that he specifically called himself a black Nazi and the Republican party threw him under the bus.

The lieutenant governor and attorney general remain odd, but that’s NC for you. They sometimes just vote Democrat for statewide State races and then vote republican federal.

I suppose the counter question would be if they were manipulating the votes directly, why not also rig the down ballot election?

The number of fatal incidents is probably more informative for most conclusions. We rarely have a passenger airliner incident and this year we had one. That really moves number of deaths statistics despite not having a particularly informative different cause than other aviation accidents.

The point is there is certainly some intent for visualizing and sharing the data, and a nuanced understanding of the circumstances make it obvious that, as yet, the number of fatalities while tragic, is not indicative of any trend yet. If you went by “number of fatal incidents” the graph would look less anomalous. We’ve had many years without any passenger liner incidents, and this year we have had one.

So it’s a graph that wants to be suggestive of something but ultimately shouldn’t be considered suggestive of any comparative significance. It’s data that is precisely what it purports to be, but there are intended inferences that have to be answered.

I don’t see why any level, even knowing “furry” would find these particular designs “objectionable” and worthy of rejecting. They aren’t even vaguely fetishized.

There’s some self selecting bias there, going to a ‘furry convention’ is a rather steeper level of engagement than just, say, looking at a webcomic featuring art like this mascot here.

Those more hard core sexual furries scare off casual furries as well as folks a bit timid about being associated with the most… Forthcoming portion of the fandom.

It’s rough on some as they want to engage without sexual interest in the aesthetic, but as a result get grouped in with those with a sexual interest. They want to identify as something, and furry is closest, but they aren’t into the sexual facet and struggle with that broad association.

I know someone who is into the general aesthetic of SFW “furry” stuff but is a bit weird about it because one of two things happens if she shares some content she likes:

• People turn away because they think she’s into that stuff sexually
• People get way too into engaging with her because they think she’s into that stuff sexually.

Feels like there needs to be some better nuance between “I like furry style SFW art” and “I’m all into furry in the the way people guess”. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, but it’s certainly something you should have to explicitly opt into rather than an assumption based on liking or doing a drawing or like wearing an animal ear headband or non-plug tail or something similarly innocuous.