If you were a Democratic strategist, would you rather win the House or Senate? I understand the differences between the two in terms of...

There is no one answer to this question that is clearly correct. I can think of at least three answers that are equally valid.

First, you can argue that it does not matter which house of Congress the Democrats win if they are only going to win one house. (And we don’t know who is going to be the president.) If the Democrats only control one house and the presidency, they will not be able to push their agenda through Congress without Republican help anyway. Therefore, it will not matter which house they control. If the Democrats lose the presidency, they only need to control one house in order to obstruct whatever Trump tries to do while in office. Either way, it does not matter which house they control.

Second, you can argue that it is better for them to control the House than the Senate. The main reason for this is that a minority party in the Senate can obstruct anything it wants to under the current rules of the chamber. As long as the Democrats stay united and have more than 40 senators, they can filibuster anything that the Republicans try to do. In other words, they do not need to control the Senate in order to block the Republicans there. In that case, they might as well control the House where the majority party has so much more power than it does in the Senate.

Finally, you can argue that the Democrats should prefer to control the Senate. This is contingent on them being willing and able to change the rules governing the filibuster. Some observers speculate that whichever party wins the Senate this election will try to do away with the filibuster because it has become such a powerful obstructive tool that nothing can get done in the Senate any longer. If this happens, the Democrats would clearly want to control the Senate. If they controlled the Senate and the filibuster no longer existed they could confirm any nominees put forward by a Clinton administration. If they did not control the Senate and there was no filibuster, they would be unable to block any nominees that Trump named. In this no-filibuster scenario, control of the Senate would be vitally important and Democrats would much prefer to control that chamber rather than the House.

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

nouns - what do you call the person who passes the trophies to the prize giver/presenter?

The person who gives out the trophies to the winners are called award presenters. So what do u call the person who passes the trophies to the presenter? Thanks!

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.

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