Category: Elections

Maddow on AK-SEN

Rachel Maddow had a great segment last night on the Alaska Senate race, particularly the surprising path it’s taken since the primary election. Scott McAdams, Maddow points out, has run a great Alaska-focused campaign. Meanwhile Murkowski is running as a write-in and Joe Miller is a Palin-esq candidate with a new scandal every 24-48 hours.

This race is really close – closer than polls can adequately reflect with the write-in situation. I’m predicting that the winner of this race doesn’t have more than 37% of the vote. It’s totally likely that McAdams can surge forward and win the race, as Murkowski voters realize that they cannot expect her to win as a write-in and Joe Miller shows himself to be a totally non-viable option for any Alaskan who isn’t a dyed in the wool Tea Partier.

On Maddow’s show, Nate Silver says:

I mean, Joe Miller won the primary with an infusion of money from the Tea Party which is worth half a million dollars, right? So, you know, he can get very high levels of turnout among Democrats. There are some liberal-leaning, centrist and independents. There are also people who just don’t like either Murkowski or Joe Miller, you know?

So, the potential for him to reach 35 percent, maybe 36 percent is there. He would need some help though to make sure that the remaining votes are split about evenly between the two Republicans, because otherwise, you know, he might do as well as you can in a state like Alaska and not quite come out ahead.

Well Nate, let’s keep in mind that Mark Begich was elected statewide in 2008 against Alaskan icon Ted Stevens. Begich won 47.8% and Stevens won 46.5%. This cycle is a bit different, which Silver notes, but it’s not really accurate to say that the best a Democrat can do in Alaska is 35-36%. All that said, if McAdams gets 35-36% of the vote, he has a great shot of winning.

Reid vs Angle

The Harry Reid vs Sharron Angle Nevada Senate debate was the first full debate I’ve watched this cycle. It was a pretty painful affair. Harry Reid is not a charismatic speaker and he frequently falls into Senate-ese (talking about the CBO repeatedly and rushing over complex bill paths in ways that kept them confusing). And Sharron Angle, well, makes you wish for the TV-ready soundbites of Christine O’Donnell. At least O’Donnell’s incoherent was with the content of her ideas alone and didn’t have sentence structure as an added epistemological smoke bomb.

Dave Weigel watched the debate and writes:

Asked whether she still believed, as she did as a state legislator, that health insurance companies should not be obligated to cover certain procedures, Angle responded with a cold answer about free markets. “You don’t have to force anyone to buy a product that no one wants.” This allowed Reid to do what Democrats have not been able to do credibly since the start of the health care debate: Position himself against the insurance companies, as a watchdog on their abuses. Angle’s follow-up was also weirdly cold. Reid had rambled a bit about how the Susan Komen and other anti-breast cancer campaigns proved how worried the public was about treatment, so Angle riffed: “Pink ribbons are not going to help anyone have a better insurance plan.” What does that even mean? Let’s say the government is totally removed from health insurance — wouldn’t third-party fundraising pressure groups play an important role in keeping companies honest?

The Tea Party has largely been Republicanism without the time-tested rhetorical tools that hide what Republicans are actually trying to do in government. It’s not different, it’s just less polished. As a result, Tea Party candidates come across as cruel, crass, and solipsistic. This was particularly true with Sharron Angle, whose notion of compassion seems to be limited to poor multinational corporations who are unfairly prohibited from selling toxic toys or spoiled meats.

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been a pretty harsh critic of Harry Reid over his tenure as Senate Leader. He’s certainly shown himself better of late and I absolutely hope he gets reelected. But beyond whatever affection I have for Reid, my fear of what someone as fundamentally unqualified as Sharron Angle would do in the Senate is truly motivating. Angle is ideologically incompatible with governance – and she’s probably the most qualified of the Tea Party Senate nominees. To that end, here’s Tom Tomorrow’s vision of  some of what we’ll get from this Tea Party crowd, if they’re elected to the Senate.

Tom Tomorrow
Click to read the whole toon.

Better Outlook for Midterms

Jane Hamsher has a comprehensive post on why Democrats are poised to do better than you’d think in the midterm elections. It’s great to see a lot of varying strings of thought pulled together in one place, particularly as the elections are getting closer and contrary to Conventional Wisdom, Democrats are starting to look stronger at the polls. While there isn’t any reason to expect Democrats to gain seats, races around the country are tightening and places where Republicans should be walking away with pickups are becoming places where Democrats can hold onto seats.

Hamsher writes:

It’s indisputable that the Democrats will have a tough time this fall. There is just no way you can escape the fact that the party in power is going to take the heat when the country is experiencing 10% unemployment.  Higher turnout will help the Democrats, but it won’t save them.  However, small margins in key races may make a big difference, and when it comes to the kind of intense ground game we’re going to see in key races over the next few weeks, I’d have to say the incumbent Democrats are better prepared than most of their Republican challengers.  And if everything breaks towards the Democrats between now and election day, and control of the House comes down to 2-3 seats, that could provide the margins they need.

This is going to be really close. Democrats really don’t have any business being competitive now, especially given how the last three months have gone. But they’re still in this thing, not just in the Senate but the House too. A failure by the GOP to capture both the House and the Senate (let alone the House), should go down as one of the greatest missed electoral opportunities in American history.

Singly Assured Destruction

Ryan Grim of Huffington Post reports:

Senate Democrats are looking to punt the tax-cut debate past the November elections, facing pushback on voting from Democrats facing election in 2010, senior Democratic aides say. The party will gather this afternoon for a caucus-wide meeting to set the pre-election agenda, but it appears increasingly unlikely that it will include the much-hyped tax-cut vote.

The White House has been pushing hard for such a vote, circulating polling showing that a majority of Americans, including wide margins of independents, support extending the middle-class tax cuts. Ultimately, though, Democrats up for election feared an assault from the GOP that the party was raising taxes on “small businesses,” even though a vanishingly small portion of those who would face a tax hike are real small businesses. But, in an age of 30-second commercials, it only takes one to stare into the camera and lament the effect of the tax change on hiring.

2002-2004 called. They want their Democratic chickenshittery back.

Seriously, it’s hard to not react to this by screaming and pulling your hair out. The Obama middle class tax cut was a brilliant squeeze play on Republicans that would both provide a strong electoral boost and show that the Democrats are acting with working Americans’ interests in mind. While Democrats are on the verge of pushing through a month-long electoral surge that has effectively put the House back in a holdable place and made keeping the Senate nearly certain, not holding a vote on Obama’s middle class tax cut package will surely cost Democrats seats in both chambers in November. And it’s all because they’re afraid of what attack ads Republicans will run if Democrats vote against a Republican tax cut for the wealthy and big business. News flash: the whole reason this strategy was going to work was that Democrats were the ones who were going to hit their opponents with ads of them voting against middle class tax cuts!

It’s really hard to want to work for people who are so hell-bent on losing the few legislative fights they choose to pick and losing their seats in the process.

Nationalizing the Election

Greg Sargent writes:

[T]he best way for Dems to nationalize the elections right now is for Congress to hold a vote on whether to extend the middle class tax cuts. If Dems did this, it would reinforce the national strategy that Dems already have in place: Making the case that a vote for the GOP is a vote to return to the Bush policies that ran the economy into the ground.

Actually, rather than “hold a vote on whether to extend the middle class tax cuts,” Democrats should hold a vote on Obama’s middle class tax cuts. If the goal is to really draw contrast with Republicans is not to even include a hint of a frame that implies the middle class tax cuts were ever something they cared to support.

The other side of the coin is that after the free-standing vote on Obama’s middle class tax cuts package, let there be a vote on the large tax cut for the rich that the Republicans want starting 1/1/11. The contrast will be clear: Democrats support tax cuts for the middle class and oppose them for the rich, while Republicans oppose them for the middle class and support them for the rich.

Hubris is a virtue, right?

I’m not sure why Digby is trying to warn the Tea Party away from the “puerile arrogance” seen in this video. Personally, I think the Republican base is right. Clearly they are going to win in 2010. It’s just a formality now. Everyone can put down their tea bags and go watch reruns of Surviving Nugent from Netflix for the next seven weeks.

Also, I think the pledge in this video that not only will there be no new taxes and no high spending under a Tea Party-driven Republican Party, but that under a Republican majority there will be “no more taxes” and “no more spending.” So if the federal government exists one day into a Republican majority, the American public was lied to. Or, more importantly, the Tea Party was lied to and their only remaining course of action will be to throw the bums out…AGAIN!

Lost Optimism

Back in April, I predicted that Democrats would actually shape up to be in a good position heading into the November election:

It feels really weird to write this, but as of today, April 22nd, 2010, I’m not that concerned about the fate of Democrats in midterms. Granted, they haven’t done much to make me care too deeply about the size of the Democratic majority in either chamber or even holding on to both. If I had to guess based on where we are in late April, Democrats will lose a couple seats in the Senate and a low two-digit number in the House, but maintain legitimate majorities in both chamber.

In addition to healthcare, I expect Wall Street reform and immigration reform to pass in some state. There’ll probably be a number of smaller jobs bills that are passed before the fall too. Take into account that Republicans continue to abide by a doomed-to-fail strategy of mistaking their base’s disappointment with Obama with independents’ disappointment with Obama and this doesn’t look like it will be a catastrophic election for Democrats. I don’t expect gains, but given where we were six to nine months ago, I think it’s a pretty good place to be, if you care about the electoral fate of Democrats.

From where we are today in early September, this prediction was massively off-base. The economy has stayed south and there has not been a lot of good legislation moving forward from Democrats. We don’t really know today what the administration’s plan for fixing the economy is, nor do we see any urgency about solving the unemployment crisis. This has lead to a truly awful environment for Democrats. While people aren’t really in love with the Republican brand, “Anyone Else” is winning out over “The Guys We’re Not Happy With.”

We are about to come off another brutal August where Republican messaging dominated the media. Congress will come back soon and that will change, but from where we are today, I’d predict that Democrats lose the House. If they hold the Senate, it will only be by 2 votes. Things still have ample opportunity to get better for Democrats, but more importantly, there is still opportunity for them to get worse. And right now, I’d bet the Under.

Sort of Odd?

Adam Serwer, writing at Greg Sargent’s place, writes:

It’s sort of odd that in an election where Democrats are doing badly because they failed to do more to revive the economy, they’re foundering for a message while facing opponents who are promising to do even less.

It is something more than sort of odd. It’s a demonstration of a truly massive failure to seize their opportunity, fix the economy, and make the Tea Party (or, even better, the Republican Party) electorally insignificant. And as a result, it’s likely that voters will end up voting in a party who only promises to make their lives and this economy worse. Yes, this is more than sort of odd.

Scott McAdams

Steve Aufrecht of What Do I Know? shot this video of Alaska’s Democratic Senate nominee Scott McAdams in Anchorage on Wednesday. McAdams is the mayor of Sitka, Alaska, and though he isn’t widely known across the state like a couple other Alaskan mayors, he is the real deal.

Dave Weigel at Slate asks a good question:

Do you reach a point where $250,000 in Alaska is worth more than $250,000 to bail out Blanche Lincoln? I think you’re already there.

I hope the party is ready to get behind Scott McAdams. If he ends up facing Joe Miller there is no doubt that he can win. I met him briefly at Netroots Nation and was very impressed with him. All of the Alaskan bloggers I talk to think McAdams is a great candidate and a great Democrat. He would be a great representative for Alaska and a great addition to the Democratic caucus (especially when you think about what Joe Miller might do if he’s given a vote in the Senate).

I’ll be watching this race closely.

Primaries Are Good, But…

I think primaries are really good, healthy things for both democracy broadly and the Democratic Party specifically. In my home state of Connecticut, there’s a heated primary going on between grassroots hero Ned Lamont and Stamford mayor Dan Malloy. It’s not that it’s a close race – Ned is well ahead of Malloy and is likely going to win the primary by double digits. But Malloy has been spinning some of nastiest, negative attacks I’ve seen in a Democratic primary since, well, Joe Lieberman was attacking Ned Lamont in 2006. CT Bob has a post up today that covers the recent mud Malloy is throwing and puts Dan in his place for doing it. What’s so shocking and depressing about Malloy’s attacks is that they are verbatim the same ones Lieberman used against Ned in 2006 and every single one was refuted by facts then. That is, despite the fact that he has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, Malloy is repeating Lieberman’s attacks and he has to know that they’ve been proven false already. As Bob writes, “Malloy is running the most cynical and dishonest campaign I’ve ever seen.” This is scorched earth stuff and it’s not good for Connecticut nor is it good for the Democratic Party.