Tag Archives: 2014 elections

WHAT YOU DIDN’T READ, ABOUT THE 2014 ELECTIONS

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WHAT YOU DIDN’T READ, ABOUT THE 2014 ELECTIONS

Memo to Democrats: This is what you get, when the face of the Democratic Party is the Clintons.

Memo to Democrats: No passionate voter likes a lack of choice, a monopoly candidate.

Memo to Democrats: Passionate voters are not inspired by an election that looks preordained. Let alone by an election that looks bought. Let alone by an election that looks preordained, bought, timid, platitudinous, and uninteresting.

Wishes and hopes

Memo to Dems: Candidate Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 primaries decisively. She had more money and endorsements than popular appeal. She continued to downgrade other candidates, after the strategy ceased to wok. She and her husband were the boys-on-the-bus choice rather than the people’s choice. She and her husband were more the Republicans’ choice for a Democratic Party candidate than Democrats’ choice.

Memo: All of these factors persist today.

Memo to Democrats: A first in U.S. history, when Hillary Clinton fell behind during the primary process, she made open comments on the campaign trail that seemed to accommodate the possibility of assassinating a more popular candidate. She (and her team) tried to play the race card against a better and more effective candidate.

Memo to Dems: Playing to the David Gergens of the world works for Republican candidates; it does not work for Democratic candidates. The national political press has not effectively reported, let alone supported, movement on issues of national importance (recall the Washington Post’s campaign against health insurance reform), especially when reporting might benefit Democrats. It has aggressively reported the eccentricities and frailties of Tea Party types, while covering for establishment GOP candidates (recall the absolute silence this year about the young George P. Bush’s run-ins with the law, including the stalking incident/s re a former girlfriend).

In happier news: President Obama had a good press conference yesterday. As usual, he made important points with admirable concision. Among them,

  • “voters expect us to focus on their ambitions, and not on ours.”
  • two thirds of the electorate did not vote
  • “Voters went five for five” to increase the minimum wage. In other words, the minimum wage won in all five states where it came on the ballot (even when GOP anti-minimum-wage candidates won their senate races).
  • “We are more than simply a collection of red and blue states. We are the United States.” 

He also listed, concisely, a few items on the agenda for the current Congress, before its term ends: support for measures domestic and abroad against the Ebola virus; authorization to use military force against ISIS; and a budget that will cover the rest of the fiscal year.

Then you get the other side:

More GOP name-calling for a woman

Speaking of items not reported, or not reported with clarity, below are a few examples (besides the young George P. Bush’s stalking) of what newspaper readers did not see in the 2014 election cycle. Items are boldfaced.

A Democratic Party candidate is not written about as a “moderate,” in the national political press. That word “moderate” is reserved for Republicans, raising questions such as, ‘What is the “moderate” number of deaths from unsafe toys/unsafe workplaces?”

The GOP establishment prevented Tea Partyers and other unwelcome candidates from winning in 2014. Following several prominent examples from 2012–Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, etc.–the party was aware of the dangers going into 2014, well aware of them. And the Republican Party establishment met the challenges at every turn except for the Virginia primary that ousted Eric Cantor and, possibly, except for the Iowa primary that elected Joni Ernst. David Brat was the only challenger/Tea Party-type who did not have to meet other challenger/Tea Partyer candidates in his GOP primary. (Cantor did not have to contend with another establishment figure/rival, either. But having the establishment field to himself wasn’t enough.)

So simple, so effective: In primary after primary, the establishment candidate was alone; the Tea Partyers were multiple. So the arithmetic of the field won, almost every time: a divided vote on the “insurgent” or Tea Party side gave the establishment candidate or incumbent a majority or at least a plurality of the electorate, almost every time. (The Iowa senate primary was the only exception, and a mixed bag; the Chamber of Commerce supported Ernst, as did the Washington, D.C.-based company that created her two attention-getting ads.)

Little to none of this scenario was reported in the national political press, even when the national political press covered a state or local election, and even when boys-on-the-bus coverage used the incumbent/establishment versus challenger/Tea Partyer model. Instead, the inevitable outcome of a Republican primary was inevitably reported as a victory for “moderate” GOPers over extremists/outsiders/clowns/rubes/Ebola-laden virus carriers, regardless of the margin of victory for the establishment figure, and regardless of the vote share taken by non-establishment candidates.

There is no guarantee, of course, that a one-against-one race will produce a win for the Tea Partyer. But the party took no chances. In every primary of any significance, the field was cleared for the ‘establishment’ type, and almost every time, the arithmetic of the field was decisive.

It was actually D.C.-based media consultant Todd Harris who came up with the hog and gunshot ads for Joni Ernst in Iowa. Ersatz machismo, Iowans. You voted for second-hand K Street knockoffs, thinking they were independence.

This nonsense is infuriating to anyone who actually knows anything about farming. My maternal grandparents were farmers, and they raised a couple of pigs each year–piglets in spring, sausages in fall. The hogs were humanely fed and treated, although no one made a big song and dance about it. They were not castrated. Castrating the animals is designed to produce an unnaturally large and capon-like hog, analogous to tying geese down and force-feeding them to produce fois gras. Ernst’s and Harris’s castrating metaphor is another indication of the ties that bind to agribusiness, not of robust independence. Ernst could use the username bogusfarmgrl. The Ernst-Harris ad made an effective call for campaign donations from agricultural interests, as the gunshot ad called successfully for donations from the NRA. The latter also, of course, called for assassinating a president. The established political pundits who let that one pass failed a significant test.

The Bushes are back. Not with a groundswell of enthusiasm. Under-qualified Bush administration alumni are still doing their usual, and some got elected to office. Others continue to work publicly or behind the scenes in government, media, and NGOs. The burrowers should have been fired in 2009.

Al Gore Should Have Built a Smaller House. MSNBC should have kept Keith Olbermann. Al Gore fired Olbermann at CurrentTV (after I published a brief criticism of Gore’s non-eco-friendly house construction) and then sold CurrentTV to Al Jazeera. MSNBC is not worth watching. No Olbermann; too little reporting; too much parroting the boys-on-the-bus groupthink.

Memo to Democrats: Being in office does not give you some magical, Tinkle Bell-fairy dust protection against losing office. Corollary: Having the endorsement of official Democrats does not necessarily win you the office.

What works, if anything will, is trying to do a good job in office. As Working Families points out, “Unless and until Democrats are seen as actually improving people’s lives, the path is open for Republicans to stoke fears about declining living standards and stoke white anxiety about a racially changing America.” Democrats who showcased their work on raising the minimum wage and passing paid sick days for workers, for example, won.

In this context, a few words on some more local races in Maryland are in order. Again, boldface for the non-reported or under-reported items.

Maryland was not a Republican sweep. The governorship went to the purportedly anti-tax white guy, but Dems Peter Franchot and Brian Frosch won state Comptroller and Attorney General respectively. None of the Maryland Democrats in the U.S. House were even threatened with a close race, except John K. Delaney in District 6, who won anyway; Delaney’s opponent did get more votes on Election Day but not enough to overcome Delaney’s large advantage in the early voting.

It did not help Dems, or electoral participation, in Maryland that late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee’s death on October 21 meant several days of non-stop articles in the paper about the Washington In Crowd, a week before the 2014 elections. The orgy of self-back-patting over Post glory days, while understandable, does not appeal to any population.

In good news from Maryland, and Prince George’s County, a series of bond issues passed, as did other referenda.

The only Prince George’s County referendum that lost was one extending term limits for County Council and County Executive from two terms to three consecutive terms. Looks as though Rushern Baker’s running unopposed for County Executive (except for write-ins) was not overwhelmingly popular. Baker hasn’t done enough in office; too busy playing keep-away. Try to ‘explore’ the feeble county web site.

Rushern Baker, endorsed by the Washington Post, and running unopposed for reelection, got a total 184,663 votes for County Executive. The total was somewhat more than for the Clerk of the Circuit Court and the Register of Wills got, also running unopposed. But less than the highly qualified and effective Angela Alsobrooks got (185,770) for State’s Attorney from P.G., also unopposed.

State Senator Victor Ramirez got 14, 363 for reelection as state senator for District 47–the lowest vote total in the state, for a winning senator, opposed or unopposed. Several losing candidates for state senate also got more votes.

Back to the national scene:

If Mark Begich loses in Alaska, then three Democratic incumbent senators will have lost, in predictable states–Begich; Mark Pryor in Arkansas; and Kay Hagan in North Carolina. Of the three, Hagan and Begich did far better than Pryor. Pryor’s wipe-out in Arkansas should make the hack pundits quit drooling over Bill Clinton (or Hillary Clinton) as campaigners and vote-getters.

Stumping and stumped in Arkansas

Hillary Clinton did not run for Senate from Arkansas. No one mentions the fact. In all the palaver about the Clintons as pols, hasn’t anyone noticed that they did not leave Arkansas in good shape for Democrats? Their team had thirty years in Arkansas. They did as little for the 99 percent as they could get away with doing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blacks helped Thad Cochran win? –Not so fast.

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Blacks helped Thad Cochran win? –Not so fast.

A seductive meme: ‘Black voters in Mississippi helped Thad Cochran win’. But it sounds too good to be true.

One day after the primary, the story makes the rounds like Paul Revere, except faster and in a warmer climate–black voters held their noses, or better, and put Sen. Thad Cochran over the top in a perilously close runoff, after he was being written off for dead by the national political press. Examples abound, like here and here and here and here. A related meme and a more refined way of saying the same thing runs that ‘Democrats helped Cochran pull off the win’; a by-product of Mississippi’s ‘open primary’ system, Cochran’s win is attributed to crossover voting by Democrats who did not vote in the June 3rd Mississippi primary, as in this article. There are less polite ways of putting the same thing; setting aside most of the predictable non-news-media examples from wingers, a typical partisan example runs here, with an interesting thread. ‘Cochran won with the help of Democrats’ is all over cyberspace, not entirely with a view to praising Cochran.

Challenger Chris McDaniel himself is taking a version of the same line, expressing public doubt about whether the GOP senate primary in Mississippi was won by Republican voters.

From the top–it is entirely possible that a few African-Americans voted for Cochran, and in an extremely close county, even a few votes would influence the win, at least for that county. For my money, though, it is highly unlikely that the outcome in Hinds County will turn out to have been brought about by African-American votes.

Maybe not all white

If I turn out to be wrong, so be it; I’ll believe it when I see it. Further evidence will be interesting. Meanwhile–

This is a juicy story, and I am all for juicy stories. In a payback’s-a-bitch kind of way, it is almost irresistible: McDaniel supporters who did everything but show up in white sheets to vote, stymied by some of the overlooked figures disenfranchised for so long, like a scene from Blazing Saddles. In somewhat more elevated perspective, the story is appealing as another chapter of forgiveness in a very long book. It is also refreshing in showing at least some acquaintance with history; recognizing, for example, that the flatland (alluvial plain) areas of Mississippi are the areas with the largest majorities of African Americans, for reasons briefly explained below.

 

But at this point, whatever truth there may be in this story is getting way too big a megaphone. It seems almost ungracious to raise questions, but questions remain.

 

Two sides of GOP coin

For a start, we do not know how many African Americans turned out to vote in the June 24 runoff. A few media interviews do not make a trend; more importantly, they do not provide exact and accurate numbers. Since Mississippi does not register voters by party, we do not know how many registered Democrats voted in the runoff; we do not know how many of the June 24 voters were Republican and how many were Democratic. In fact, party registration in the Magnolia State has to be inferred from votes, after an election, as in this 2012 article. (Note that the piece quotes then-State Sen. Chris McDaniel on a GOP ‘enthusiasm gap’.) Or, of course, one can try to infer it from ethnicity, since the Mississippi GOP has been the de facto White People’s Party ever since the Dixiecrats ran out of sand.

Logo but no Raymond Loewy

Mississippi has 82 counties. Cochran carried some 52 of them in the June 3rd primary–a better outcome than hinted by most of the media coverage. In the June 24th runoff, he lost two counties that he had won before, while increasing his totals and of course improving the outcome.  As widely reported, both Cochran and McDaniel upped their totals and the turnout on June 24. The over-all vote from unofficial results was Cochran 185,104 to McDaniel 179,263 or a statewide margin of 5,841 for Cochran.

The scenario making the rounds is that Cochran won by drawing more votes in majority-black counties, especially in the Mississippi Delta. This synopsis is the one that needs demurral. There is a difference between saying that Cochran won in black-majority counties, which is accurate–though not the whole picture–and saying that Cochran won because blacks voted for him. The latter statement needs careful checking.

(For convenience, I am using this map.)

Landscape

Start by taking a look at the Delta region, actually not deltoid but a rather broad swath of flat land–alluvial plain–running north and south up and down the Mississippi River, in Mississippi and Arkansas. This land was farmed as ‘plantations’ in Mississippi in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, importing large numbers of slave laborers, because its immense tracts of fertile soil were ripe for the early versions of agribusiness, making cash crops like cotton and rice profitable where they were less feasible in the wooded hill country elsewhere in the state. The descendants of slaves outnumber the descendants of slaveholders in Delta counties–a fact not lost on the state’s white power structure.

 

Unsolicited book plug

True enough, Cochran won in every Delta county up and down the Mississippi River, except for Wilkinson County down at the bottom of this stretch (but north of the Gulf Coast), and DeSoto County at the very top of the stretch (but south of Memphis). However, look at Cochran’s margins of victory in these lands of former grandees.

Vote margins, heading south down the Mississippi River from Tunica County:

  • 149
  • 313
  • 689 (Bolivar)
  • 849 (Washington)
  • 55
  • 424 (Warren)
  • 49
  • 26
  • 273

Remember, these are actual votes cast, not percentages. Of these Delta counties, Cochran won three by fewer than 100 votes. He won another three by fewer than 500 votes. This is nine out of 82 counties, all majority African-American, giving Thad Cochran a total vote margin (in unofficial returns) of 2,827 votes. A win is a win, of course, and some of the percentages are impressive–Washington County went for Cochran by 70 percent, Tunica County by 72 percent–but those percentages mask some very micro numbers. Issaquena County gave Cochran the win by a whopping 71 percent–which translates into 92 votes (to 37 for McDaniel). It is entirely possible that this turnout, which will surely earn Mr. Cochran the nickname of ‘Landslide Thad’ for the next several years, was 100 percent white.

For good or ill, this is not a black avalanche. In fact, Cochran’s wins all along the river gave him a total margin of victory less than the margin for McDaniel in DeSoto County alone; DeSoto, also touching the river but majority white, went for McDaniel by a margin of 3,904.

The Delta being a fairly wide expanse in some places, let’s move over one row of counties eastward, to be thorough, and tally the next north-to-south row of counties. This series of 13 counties begins just south of DeSoto County, which as mentioned went almost two-to-one for McDaniel. Though not touching the Big Muddy, these counties are contiguous to those next to the Mississippi and share some features. Tate County at the north end of this row of counties, and majority white, went for McDaniel, as did Franklin and Amite at the south end of this stretch. The counties that Cochran won gave him the following margins, north to south:

  • 79
  • 86
  • 154
  • 413 (Sunflower)
  • 210
  • 234 (Sharkey)
  • 235 (Yazoo)
  •  5,301 (Hinds)
  •  86
  • 432 (Lincoln)

Again, these are the margins by numerical vote. (In my county, they would look more like precinct totals, not county totals, except for the Jackson tally.) Cochran won three of these counties by fewer than 100 votes, six by fewer than 500 votes, and only one–Hinds County, with the city of Jackson–by a substantial margin.

Margins for McDaniel in Tate, Franklin, and Amite:

  • 596
  • 166
  • 380

Compare these margins. Leaving Hinds County aside, Cochran’s total margin for this row of counties one over from the Mississippi was 1,929. McDaniel’s total margin for his wins in three counties in this row was 1,142. Counting Hinds County, Cochran’s total vote margin from his wins in these 24 counties was 10,057. McDaniel’s total vote margin, in the same area of the state, in counties where he won, was 5,046. The difference even including Jackson is 5,011 votes.

Yes, McDaniel lost the state by only 5,841 votes.

But he won Jones County (alone) by 9,209 votes.

Taking a look at the statewide picture from a different angle, let’s start with majority-white areas that went for Cochran. Take the Gulf Coast.

Majority white Harrison County gave Cochran a solid win. Hancock County, 90 percent white, gave Cochran a solid win. Of the three Mississippi counties on the coast, all three with very sizable white majorities, only Jackson County went for McDaniel, by 296 votes.

Cochran’s total vote margin in the largely-white Gulf Coast of Mississippi:  410 + 3,633 – 296 = 3,747.

The Gulf Coast vote for Cochran is being written about–or written off–as the result of military contracts, and it may indeed be related to business and contracts. That still leaves the rest of the state. Cochran won almost two-thirds of the 82 Mississippi counties, spread over the state from Alcorn in the north to Harrison in the south, and from Bolivar in the west to Lowndes on the eastern border with Alabama. Two additional small majority-black counties that went for Cochran include Noxubee, with a margin of 64 votes, on the eastern border of the state, and Kemper just south of Noxubee, with a margin of 80 votes. Majority-white counties that went for Cochran include Tippah, Alcorn, Prentiss, Lauderdale, Lowndes, Monroe, Smith, Simpson, Scott, Newton, and Neshoba. This list is not exhaustive, and more detailed analysis of the runoff election will have to wait for official vote tallies. Meanwhile, however, it will be wise to remember that while McDaniel did better than Cochran in some rural thicketed counties, Cochran still won quite a few of them. And while McDaniel indeed seems not to have won any counties that were not majority-white, Cochran won a sizable number of both majority-white and majority-black counties.

Furthermore, the small vote totals leave an outcome easily conceivable in a universe of white, Republican Mississippi voters. If Cochran’s vote totals and margins had been in the tens of thousands, the picture would be different. But neither the votes themselves nor the increase in Cochran’s turnout over the June 3 is evidence of African-American ballots. Cochran may have grown his vote “in the Mississippi Delta, the largely black and strongly Democratic northwest of the state,” as in this roundup in Slate, but neither the increase nor the margin of victory nor the number of votes cast shows an incursion of cross-party voting; the numbers fall easily inside the range of possibility for–frankly–exclusively white voters. In any case, the brief scenario linked here omits the fact that Cochran also grew his vote in other terrains and in numerous other counties around the state, as above.

Time will tell more about such evidence as there is. The weird case of the McDaniel supporters has yet to unfold. Meanwhile, the outside-agitators meme is better confined to the extreme amounts of money actually, provably, demonstrably spent on this statewide runoff, rather than extended to fantasies of voter sabotage of an ‘open primary’.

 

Next: This Is an “Open” Primary?