Tag: republicans

I propose a new strategy for dealing with Democratic whining.

Assuming that the Republican party survives this election cycle intact, I have a proposal for dealing with whatever cause du jour that the Democrats come up with in the future. It goes like this: just [expletive deleted]ing ignore it. Don’t even say ‘whatever.’ Don’t even roll the eyes.  Just shrug it off and go do something else.

I mean, seriously: think about what’s going on right now with that Supreme Court nomination thing. We told the Democrats that Obama wasn’t going to get to replace Scalia. The Democrats started screaming. And we… ignored them, because we have real problems right now and what do we care if the Democrats are aggrieved over it?  And as a result, the Democrats are still trying to push the same buttons of ours that they always push, only this time we legitimately don’t care.  They were expecting movement by now.  They haven’t gotten any.

Admittedly, we don’t care because we’re in the middle of an existential crisis.  But if we happen to come through without exploding, I suggest that this strategy might pay dividends generally. Because it turns out that the Democrats have only a limited ability to force Republicans to do things that Republicans don’t want to do.  Go figure…

Right about now, the District of Columbia Republican Party…

…(yes, it exists) is coming to a realization: this go-round, they matter.  They have 19 delegates!  There are candidates who want those 19 delegates!  People are going to come up to them and say, “When are you posting your results?” with, hey, real interest in their voices!

I’m not even mocking them for it.  The rest of this campaign season may be an endless carnival of destruction, pain, and personal vendettas – but the smaller state/district/territorial parties must be having the time of their lives. Shoot, I should probably go over early Saturday and score an interview with these guys. Why not? It’s news.

GOP candidates to actually discuss education in August; Democrats are… meh, whatever.

See, this is precisely what we need more of…

An education-focused news outlet run by the journalist-turned-advocate Campbell Brown plans to host presidential forums for both parties, with the first one held in New Hampshire.

[snip]

The Republican forum will be first, in August, and Jeb Bush, who has made education a signature issue in his campaign, is among those who have committed to attending. So have Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard chief executive.

Continue reading GOP candidates to actually discuss education in August; Democrats are… meh, whatever.

Oh, gee: the Democrats are ‘rebranding.’ AGAIN.

Let’s unpack the important parts of this bit about the Democratic Party’s latest rebranding effort.  First off:

In the months since their party took another electoral beating and lost the Senate to Republicans, senior Democratic strategists have launched a major effort to rebrand the party, after concluding their message no longer inspires voters who turned out to elect President Obama but sat on their hands during midterm elections.

The rebranding project is being led by Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.)…

OK, stop there.  Steve Israel was head of the DCCC in the last election cycle: which is to say, he managed to lose about twice as many seats as many people privately estimated.  It took real skill to do that, that cycle: the GOP was already enjoying a commanding lead in the House.  So, yeah, perfect choice there (sayeth the partisan Republican hack).  Moving along:

Wednesday’s meeting comes a few months after a group of polling and communications experts briefed House Democrats at a retreat in April. At that meeting, Pollock, along with strategists Anita Dunn, Doug Thornell, John Lapp and Jim Kessler…

Continue reading Oh, gee: the Democrats are ‘rebranding.’ AGAIN.

Perhaps that ‘Bush’ surname isn’t quite the ultimate political poison, after all.

This actually should not surprise anybody.

Continue reading Perhaps that ‘Bush’ surname isn’t quite the ultimate political poison, after all.

The Democrats have apparently decided to spot us NY-11.

Jolly good of them:

Last cycle, GOP Rep. Michael G. Grimm won re-election by more than dozen points in the face of a 20-count indictment and millions of dollars of Democratic attack ads. After the election, Grimm pleaded guilty to one count of tax fraud and earlier this month resigned from Congress, setting up what looked like yet another competitive special election in the Empire State.

Democrats were preparing to nominate former Rep. Michael E. McMahon or Assemblyman Michael Cusick in order to put the seat into play and, at a minimum, lay the foundation for a full takeover push in the 2016 general election. But Cusick told the Staten Island Advance Sunday he is not running, and McMahon has dialed back his initial interest to nearly zero.

Continue reading The Democrats have apparently decided to spot us NY-11.

The demographic shriveling of the Democratic party continues.

Oh, dear. It’s worse for the Democratic party than I thought.

The GOP dominance in these predominantly white working-class districts underscores the structural challenge facing Democrats: While the party has repeatedly captured the White House despite big deficits among the working-class white voters who once anchored its electoral coalition, these results show how difficult it will be to recapture the House without improving on that performance. “The question is: Are we at rock bottom here?” says Tom Bonier, CEO of the Democratic voter targeting firm TargetSmart Communications.

These trends present Republicans with a mirror-image challenge. The vast majority of their House members can thrive without devising an agenda on issues—such as immigration reform—that attract the minority voters whose growing numbers nationally have helped Democrats win the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections.

Note the weasel phrase in the last sentence, there: now that ‘Republicans can’t defeat incumbent Democratic Senators’ has joined ‘Democrats always win special elections’ in the great heap of Rules Of Thumb Past Their Sell-By Date you can expect to hear that particular factoid. Because Democrats won the popular vote in five of the last eight Presidential elections. And five of the last nine. Six of the last ten. Six of the last twelve. Eight of the last fourteen. Eight of the last sixteen. And that gets us to the end of the Truman administration. Put another way: hey, here’s a news flash! The Democrats and Republicans have been trading the White House every eight years or so since my mother was a child. Expect that to happen in 2016, too. Continue reading The demographic shriveling of the Democratic party continues.

Democrats’ vaunted social media team embarrasses its own party, again.

I thank God every day that I don’t have to produce this kind of masturbatory fodder for my political party.  ‘Ethnic cleansing.’  Ye gods and little fishes…

ethnic-cleansing

Continue reading Democrats’ vaunted social media team embarrasses its own party, again.

RIP: ‘Republicans cannot defeat Democratic incumbent Senators.’

Mourners, omit flowers.

“Republicans cannot defeat Democratic incumbent Senators.”  This was, in some ways, the single most obnoxious meme that Democrats promulgated in the last two, three election cycles, largely because it was based on an unusually facetious argument.  Basically, the idea was that Democrats had a skill set and resources that made their incumbent Senators bulletproof; there was no way that a Republican should challenge one, so the best hope the GOP had was to wait until a Democrat died or retired or something.  This was, of course, flaming nonsense on stilts, for three reasons:

  1. The 2010 election.  Blanche Lincoln and Russ Feingold both got defeated, the latter in a state that had looked (up to that point, at least) like it was getting steadily bluer and bluer. If Byron Dorgan and Evan Bayh hadn’t retired, they would have had the same problem.
  2. Retirements in general, in fact. What the meme carefully doesn’t take into account are places like Nebraska, where Ben Nelson retired rather than lose; or Senators like Chris Dodd, who was more or less forced to retire in 2010 in order to save his Connecticut seat.  And we might have gotten Virginia and Wisconsin in 2012 if Jim Webb and Herb Kohl had decided to fight it out, at that.
  3. It was always just Senators, for some reason.  The trick apparently didn’t work for incumbent Democratic governors, or statewide elected officials.  And nobody ever stopped for a moment and asked themselves “Why is that?”

Continue reading RIP: ‘Republicans cannot defeat Democratic incumbent Senators.’