Tag: 2010

The last (probably) pre-Labor Day Cook rankings.

House.
Senate.
Governorships.

If you don’t feel like clicking through the links, allow me to summarize: ten more House seats shifted in the GOP’s favor, and so did three Senate seats, and so did four Governor’s races. Only one of them (WY-GOV) is now off the actual board, but Cook is now projecting a net +6 to +8 GOP in the Governors’ races, a net +7 to +9 GOP in the Senate, and at least a net +35 GOP in the House. The House is particularly of interest, as there are currently forty-five Toss-Up races listed by Cook right now, and only three of them are Republican seats.

Couple this with the latest set of regional race polls from Republican-leaning American Action Forum, and the truly atrocious (for the other side) enthusiasm gap that Democrat-leaning Public Policy Polling is finding, and Larry Sabato’s needed-to-slam-a-shot of whiskey-first prediction of a lost House and Senate on the edge, and you get… a lot of people blankly staring at their scratch papers or computer screens and thinking This can’t be right. I must have subtracted where I should have added, or something. Or maybe I made an assumption that I shouldn’t have. Things can’t be this bad for the Democratic party. Continue reading The last (probably) pre-Labor Day Cook rankings.

The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

If you do political blogging or reporting for a while, you end up hearing this question a lot: Why should I bother to come out and vote for the [insert epithet here meaning ‘not as ideologically sound as I am’]? This would be normally responded to with a polite “That’s a good question” and a variable-length stream of blather before the question is actually answered, but let’s cut to the chase.  You bother to go out and vote for the [epithet] because:

  • Voting for the [epithet] in the House helps get you a Speaker with control over the Rules Committee, and somebody friendlier as Chair of Oversight and Government Reform.  Look them both up.
  • Voting for the [epithet] in the Senate helps get you an atmosphere where half the judiciary/executive branch appointments that you would object to strenuously quietly die stillborn.

That’s the way it works* – but you’re thinking to yourself, Well, at least I don’t have to vote for an [epithet] for governor. – but alas, no.  You do.  In some ways that’s the most critical place where you would have to if necessary, in roughly half the races out there this cycle.  Why?

Redistricting. Continue reading The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

Obama to Democrats: you may deny Me.

Hey, remember when the White House thought that they were going to be a help for vulnerable Democrats running on all those tough, unpopular, unprincipled, and job-killing votes that the White House insisted that said vulnerable Democrats make?  Yeah, well, that’s gone by the wayside.    The White House is now telling said Democrats that the President understands if members of his party have to run for re-election without him ‘helping’ out.

Just savor that for a moment: imagine that you are a Democrat from a district whose Republican-leaning constituency has been looking at you funny for your votes on the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and/or Obamacare.  You know darn well that these were going to be unpopular votes, and when you brought that up with your party’s leadership you were given what South American drug dealers call the plata o plomo response.  That’s Spanish for ‘silver or lead;’  it means, ‘take a bribe or a bullet.’  In this case, the ‘silver’ was the promise that the President would be there for your election campaign if you played ball with his administration now… and the ‘lead’ was the promise that the President would not be there to help you out if you did not play ball.  You knew that you’d need the draw if you wanted to win, so you gulped nervously and voted against your district – and now that it’s done, the President is telling you that you have permission to deny knowing the One. And no doubt thrice, if necessary. Continue reading Obama to Democrats: you may deny Me.

Rasmussen: road to 51 no longer runs through CA/CT.

People are paying a lot of attention to the House right now, but there’s something interesting going on in the Senate. And in some ways it should worry the Democrats more.

Let’s start by taking a look at Rasmussen’s state of the Senate races right now:

U.S. Senate Snapshot:
Held/Solid Democratic 48
Leans Democratic 1
Toss-Up 9
Leans Republican 3
Held/Solid Republican 39

Continue reading Rasmussen: road to 51 no longer runs through CA/CT.

#rsrh That poor, persecuted Democratic majority.

God, but these people whine so.  Via Big Government ,via Instapundit:

In a 17,000-plus-word piece published in The Nation on Thursday, journalist Eric Alterman calls the Obama presidency “a big disappointment” for progressives and blames a broken system in Washington that he says allows the minority party to rule with impunity — and special interests and big money to dictate legislative policy.

They’ve got 255/177 in the House, 58/41 in the Senate, and one of their guys in the White House, you know.  That’s normally what one would think of as being a pretty substantial majority:  if the GOP had those kinds of numbers we’d do anything that we damned well pleased.  In fact, when we did have those kinds of numbers we largely did anything that we damned well pleased.  But then, when it comes to the comfortable exercise of power we don’t, well, suck*.

Annnnd that’s the fundamental problem for the Democratic party right there: their leadership is fundamentally incapable of running the country properly.  Probably because they take progressive tripe like the above seriously.

Ach, well, self-correcting problem.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh That poor, persecuted Democratic majority.

#RSRH, Wall Street Blowback edition.

Following up on this “pseudo-populist-rhetoric-from-Democrats has consequences” post from a couple of days ago, there’s this happy comment:

“I think at least in the short term there is going to be a great deal of frustration with people who were beating the hell out of us — then turning around and asking for money,” said a senior executive of a Wall Street bank.

More here.  Hey, what are they going to do?  Give money to Republicans?

…Oh.  Right.

Moe Lane

What Gallup *didn’t* do with their enthusiasm poll.

And they should have done this, too.

Gallup just published a poll on voter enthusiasm, broken down by age. The main point – younger voters are showing fairly typical enthusiasm levels towards the 2010 elections (i.e., low ones) – is interesting (and entertaining), but there’s another important bit that did not get particularly addressed. And it’s an even more entertaining point. Continue reading What Gallup *didn’t* do with their enthusiasm poll.

Schoen & Caddell explore the urban fantasy genre.

At least, that’s the only rational explanation that I can come up with for them writing this:

To turn a corner, Democrats need to start embracing an agenda that speaks to the broad concerns of the American electorate. It should be somewhat familiar: It is the agenda that is driving the Tea Party movement and one that has the capacity to motivate a broadly based segment of the electorate.

[snip]

Winning over swing voters will require a bold, new focus from the president and his party. They must adopt an agenda aimed at reducing the debt, with an emphasis on tax cuts, while implementing carefully crafted initiatives to stimulate and encourage job creation.

Continue reading Schoen & Caddell explore the urban fantasy genre.

You know, 2009 was not a *bad* year…

…after all, my second child was born in it, which alone would make the year worthwhile.  But it’s a year that I would have otherwise fast-forwarded through if I had been given the opportunity.  I’ve been thinking about 2010 since November 5, 2008, and the only things that kept 2009 from being the Star Trek III of the decade were the NJ/VA state elections.  And now 2010 is almost here, and I have to switch gears.  It’s… odd.

Or else just ‘the deep breath before the plunge.’

Moe Lane