Tag Archives: Democratic Party

More ‘blue wave’ statistics: Today’s updates

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Today’s ‘Blue wave’ data–
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From TargetSmart, sent earlier by Politico’s “Morning Score,” here are the ten highest vote totals of early voters and absentee voters, by state.

Texas, modeled GOP, still tops the list in totals of early/absentee voting. (Texas is one of 34 states allowing early voting. Texas also has one of the longest, freest periods for early voting, which began there on October 22 and ends November 2.)

A few changes to the list since yesterday, in more voting. Tennessee, heavily GOP, outpaces Arizona to move up to sixth in votes cast so far. Colorado and Ohio move up above Michigan, now tenth. (Michigan does not have early voting but has absentee voting.) All three states are modeled GOP by this Democratic political data-services firm, but Colorado looks more like a tie.

  1. Texas – modeled GOP    (3,250,301)
  2. Florida – modeled GOP   (2,551,975)
  3. California – modeled Dem      (1,622,906)
  4. Georgia – modeled GOP         (1,188,900)
  5. North Carolina – modeled Dem     (1,127,401)
  6. Tennessee – modeled heavily GOP     (849,722)
  7. Arizona – modeled GOP         (837,583)
  8. Colorado – modeled GOP, barely       (610,426)
  9. Ohio – modeled GOP    (604,595)
  10. Michigan – modeled GOP       (574,807)

California, modeled Democratic, is still third, and Illinois, modeled Democratic, is still eleventh. Of the ten states with the most early and/or absentee voters, eight are still modeled GOP.

North Carolina is still the only plus sign for the Democratic Party in this top-ten list. Below the top ten, Iowa is calculated at the same number as before and is still modeled Democratic (282,661). So is Virginia, still with lower early voting at 189,547.

Again, the early vote totals for Texas on the website are far lower than the count provided by the Texas Secretary of State. [10/30 mistake of mine corrected here: misread total registered voters.]

The helpful breakdown of party registration provided by the state of Florida shows that a majority of vote-by-mail ballots so far are Republican; a majority of early-vote-in-person ballots so far are Democratic. Votes by mail outnumber in-person early votes.

Wisconsin – modeled GOP (219,580), and Pennsylvania – modeled GOP (93,485) are as before. (Pennsylvania does not have early voting but has absentee voting.)

Regardless of state, many of the early/absentee voters are indicated as Caucasian and as over sixty-five.

 

Updates on that ‘blue wave’question for 2018 midterms

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Is a ‘Blue wave’ really coming?

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Again, from those helpful people at TargetSmart, sent around initially by Politico “Morning Score”–below are the ten highest vote totals, reported or estimated, of early voters and absentee voters, by state. A few changes to the list since last week, aside from more votes. Texas, modeled GOP, moved up from 5th to 1st in early/absentee voting. Colorado, modeled GOP slightly, moved up into the top-ten turnout in 9th place. Arizona, modeled GOP, moved up from 8th to 6th in vote totals so far.

  1. Texas – modeled GOP    (2,380,937)
  2. Florida – modeled GOP   (2,013,970)
  3. California – modeled Dem      (1,512,058)
  4. Georgia – modeled GOP         (1,053,445)
  5. North Carolina – modeled Dem     (1,049,521)
  6. Arizona – modeled GOP         (824,130)
  7. Tennessee – modeled heavily GOP     (805,652)
  8. Michigan – modeled GOP       (574,807)
  9. Colorado – modeled GOP, barely       (548,754)
  10. Ohio – modeled GOP  (535,373)

Net effects: California, modeled Democratic, moves down to 3rd; and Illinois, modeled Democratic, slides to eleventh. The other net effect: of the ten states with the most early and/or absentee voters, eight are modeled GOP by this Democratic political data-services firm.

North Carolina remains the only plus sign for the Democratic Party in this top-ten list both in modeling and in high early/absentee vote. Illinois – modeled heavily Dem  (479,867) – unsurprisingly – also shows solid turnout/returns, though less so than Tennessee among others.

Below the top ten states, Iowa is still good news for Democrats – modeled Dem (282,661). So is Virginia, but again with lower early voting at 160,822.

The two biggest states in the top ten, Texas and Florida, still look GOP, if the modeling is accurate. It should be pointed out, however, that the early vote totals on the website differ seriously from the count provided by the Texas Board of Elections. [My mistake: inserted total for registered voters.]

Michigan and Ohio voting still look Republican. (Michigan does not have early voting, so its high total means that an awful lot of people are taking steps to vote absentee.) So do Wisconsin – modeled GOP (219,580), and Pennsylvania – modeled GOP (93,485). If North Carolina has high early/absentee voting and Democratic modeling, Pennsylvania has correspondingly low returns, so far, and Republican modeling. (Pennsylvania does not have early voting but has absentee voting.)

Someone who really wants to crystal-ball-gaze with numbers might check out the data on how many of these early/absentee voters are indicated as Caucasian and as senior citizens, by the way.

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“What went wrong” in 2016? Are they kidding?

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Going where the denial is thickest–in the news media

As a rape survivor myself*, I believe Juanita Broaddrick. I listened to Ms. Broaddrick when she was interviewed on Dateline NBC back in 1999. I listened carefully to everything she said, and–as a lifelong registered Democrat myself–I believe her with all my heart. Her accusation was that Bill Clinton assaulted her, in Arkansas, years earlier, when he was State Attorney General and widely believed to be a rising political star and a local political wunderkind. This was a rape allegation–different in degree from the several sexual harassment allegations also leveled against Clinton, and in 2016 against Donald Trump, and very different from Clinton’s compulsive philandering. Broaddrick accused Clinton of forcible rape, on national television–network, not cable–credibly, with detail, not concealing or denying her own errors or her anger at Clinton. Yet after the Clintons left the White House, Broaddrick’s name was scarcely mentioned in what are often called the ‘elite’ media. As the highly respected late columnist William Blackberry commented, it was mystifying that a credible accusation of such magnitude could be passed over. This while The Washington Post deemed that President Clinton’s affair with an intern warranted a special pull-out section titled “Presidency in Crisis”( temporarily), and Republicans in the House were voting to impeach Clinton.

It is an unanswered question, now, how many people even know who Juanita Broaddrick is. Many younger people who voted in 2016 would not have recognized her name in 2015. The fact that she became part of the public discourse largely through some rightwing outlets and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a source of regret for me personally.

The Democrats who should have acknowledged her story dropped the ball. So did the GOP, of course. Neither major party moved constructively to address the issue of rape, in the 1990s or under the George W. Bush administration. President Obama and Vice President Biden did more than any previous White House, addressing sexual assault on college campuses and problems such as the backlog of unprocessed rape kits in the criminal justice system. But much remains to be done.

Our top media outlets did far too little. Millions of words have been written about the 2016 election, with more to come; hundreds of opinion polls were taken, countless models predicted the outcome–wrongly–but so far as I know, no major media outlet polled the public on awareness of Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation against Clinton, or even on her name recognition.

A couple of points here. First, rape is a difficult topic, grim and painful, and difficult things by definition are harder to deal with than easy things. Fewer people will deal well with something difficult than with something easy, including people in the news media. Second,  as mentioned above, few people in large media outlets tried to deal with the Broaddrick story well. This gap is not consistent with a belief in Clinton’s innocence, which would have emphasized accuracy. It sweeps an issue under the rug instead of addressing it.

Third, a media focus on horse-race politics shed too little light on rape as an issue. Thus if Broaddrick’s name was mentioned at all, it was usually through the prism of possible effect on the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president. Those media personalities are now consumed with the question of ‘what went wrong’ with the 2016 election, and what went wrong with their predictions.

Conceding defeat in 2016

Conceding defeat in 2016

Democrats are also addressing the question of ‘what went wrong’, especially since the Clinton campaign is not telling.

And the Clintons are of course being faulted for not telling. On this narrow point, I can help them. This is a question they will not answer fully, because they cannot.

‘What went wrong’ is that the wife of a rapist ran for the White House.

Unthinkable? One would think so. But it wasn’t. There was no one to advise the Clintons, effectively, that Clinton should not run.  A deadly simple timeline resulted. The Clinton team decided to try the run and accumulated all the money not going to the GOP. Meanwhile, Republicans salivating at the prospect of running against ‘Hillary’ lined up, and money or no money, the GOP field was self-destructively large. Trump was the cue ball. Wham. He broke the rack on the table wide apart. And while Trump was breaking things open on the Republican side, the Clintons and their media allies were shutting out every better candidate on the Democratic side–Vice President Biden first, before the primary season even began; then Senator Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

So on one side Trump benefited from the arithmetic of the field, and on the other Clinton, with no essential constituency or platform except narrow self-interest, shut out the field.

Net result: 1) A small cadre of Democratic insiders decided to paste in a nominee before any votes were cast, and 2) they picked the worst possible candidate. The Clintons with their greed problem, their old-time insider status, their treatment-of-women problem, their ties to Wall Street, etc., etc., etc., were the worst possible choice to run against Donald Trump. Not that they knew enough to take Trump seriously, any more than they knew enough to take Sanders seriously. (So much for ‘electable’.) So much for the high-paid expertise with which they theoretically surrounded themselves.

I believe that even the quiet Lincoln Chafee would have done better than Clinton. Joe Biden would have crushed Trump. Bernie Sanders would have crushed Trump. But every political and/or media insider was convinced that Clinton was a shoo-in. And not content with being convinced themselves, they exerted pressures huge to tiny, broad and narrow, to exclude any contrary voice or dissenting opinion.

On a small scale, I saw a little of the action even near my own neighborhood. (A realistic pre-election poll might have taken into account how many millions of Americans witnessed unbecoming behavior by individuals who thought they were going to have the upper hand come Election Day.)

By the weekend before the election, I for one was wondering about the much-touted ‘landslide’. I was not very surprised at the outcome but was disappointed that Russ Feingold lost the Wisconsin senate race. Knowing the Clintons, Feingold’s appeal is probably one of the reasons they neglected Wisconsin. Much of their joint public career for forty years has consisted of playing keep-away, and much of their appeal has been to media insiders who play keep-away themselves. (A realistic post-election investigation might try to examine how the Clintons went about rewarding or enticing favorable media coverage.) No wonder they were so surprised: they shut out the very people they should have been listening to.

These issues connected to the Clintons and to the Democratic Party establishment extend to the news media which confidently predicted a big-time Clinton victory. For now, space and time constraints preclude my going into the media issues. Suffice it to say that we are now hearing self-serving commentators mutually affirming their moral superiority to the unwashed masses. Largely these are the people who went along with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As with sexual assault, it saddens me to see Iraq swept under the rug. On top of the loss of blood and treasure, in all that (temporary) emphasis on sexual assault during the campaign, no one mentioned that rape follows war.

One last point: owing to the experience I suffered, I felt pummeled throughout the 2016 election cycle–beginning with the smug, complacent assertions of Clinton’s being the inevitable nominee, in 2015 and before. The reaction is difficult to write about, even now. Several media theories about election 2016 have addressed the wrongness of the opinion polls–silent Trump voters, distrust of pollsters, faulty polling methods. I have another theory to add: that I am not the only one in my position. Few Americans would have wanted to share an intensely private perspective on Bill Clinton with pollsters. Even fewer would have wanted to volunteer their private opinion–for example, believing Juanita Broaddrick–with pollsters, without being asked to do so.

And no pollsters asked.

*This was a childhood incident. I was in elementary school at the time, an undersized fifth-grader walking alone through a big park in Houston, to a Brownies meeting. The perpetrator was not someone I knew, and the police never caught him. But at least there was none of that nonsense about not believing me. Everyone knew I could not have made it up, and anyway I was taken to the ER of the local charity hospital–Ben Taub–for an exam.

 

 

“Russia”? Really?

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Democrats and Republicans

Is the national Democratic Party trying to burn into extinction any hope that it is the party of the people? A couple of weeks ago, the word “recount” was on the lips of every mouthpiece. A week or so ago (and before and since), proposals to abolish the Electoral College were bruited. Now the drive is on to investigate Russia.

Margie Burns artwork

Modern Russian art — is a stage set really  nonobjective?

A ‘bipartisan’ alliance of the most comprehensively bought-and-sold members of Congress–led by Mitch “Big Tobacco” McConnell for the Repubs, Chuck “Big Banks” Schumer for Dems–has as of this writing signed on to allegations that Russia backed Julian Assange. Not surprisingly, entrenched Republican Senate hacks have joined ditto Dems in what is being hailed in some media outlets as an instance of bipartisan cooperation. (What these insiders chiefly have in common is that they were up-ended by Trump’s victory. This point is not being emphasized in the news media.)

Basically the claim seems to be that a) Russia hacked into U.S. Democrats’ emails, and that b) it did so to throw the election to Donald Trump. This is not a Q.E.D. It is preposterous. For one thing, the emails came from leaks, not from ‘hacking’. (Most in the McConnell-Schumer cohort would not likely know the difference.)

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(The photograph is just for fun. Merry Christmas.)

So why would any Democratic office holder, let alone one of any prominence, sign on to this Cold-War-redux saturnalia? Well, a simple motive is that in fact some Dems in office really are threatened by populism, and by elections. Some, not all. But some are genuinely threatened by any possibility of base-broadening. They live in safe congressional districts, or states (Schumer), themselves. Why would they open up access, just because not doing so is a losing proposition? After all, the smaller the pie, the larger their own piece in proportion.

Another motive is the obvious denial. Blaming ‘Russia’ is another way to delay the reckoning about their hand-picked candidate, Secretary Clinton.* That it makes them look like lying imbeciles is a small price to pay. The previous efforts at denial didn’t work–yes, Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; no, abolishing the Electoral College and throwing a whole campaign into California wouldn’t help. But there’s always another effort, and another. (Looming behind this one is the next, exhorting faithless Electors to throw away American history and just vote for someone other than President-elect Trump.)

CIA

Meanwhile, someone knocked on the right office door in halls of CIA, and found–predictably–the right leaks for their kind of investigation.

From those wonderful people who brought you the Iraq War

These are national party leaders? They don’t notice that they are leaving it to Trump to point out a fundamental fact? — “These are the same people that said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.”

Fortunately, some CIA analysts still retain a more sensible perspective.

The news media

There is no point in listing all the media outlets now boosting the ‘Russia’ meme. Most of them also boosted the recounts. Almost all also tout Clinton’s popular vote lead without mentioning the massive vote total in California, thereby creating a vague impression that the national popular vote lead was across-the-board. The impression is false.

Clinton’s vote lead is IN CALIFORNIA

For the record, below is a sprinkling of the countless recent articles that refer to Clinton’s popular vote lead without mentioning that the numbers come disproportionately from California. This very quick list does not include television programs or online news aggregates, which would run the total into thousands. We may have a new conventional wisdom here, hardening like concrete before our very eyes. Or putting it a different way, we may have a spectacular example of a narrative fueled largely by reification, denial, and cross-cultural stereotyping taking on a life of its own inside national media outlets. (See ‘Russia’, above. Even the estimable Eugene Robinson seems to be getting on the bandwagon.)

Insert the words “IN CALIFORNIA” where needed:

New York Times, December 13: “Hillary Clinton’s growing lead over Donald J. Trump is now over 1 million votes, making this the second time a president has been elected without a popular majority since 2000.”

Chicago Tribune, December 12: “With almost all ballots finally counted, Hillary Clinton won the “popular” vote — that is, the total number of votes cast — by more than 2.8 million, about a 2.1 percent edge over Trump’s tally. This is a larger gap than the one in the 2000 election, when Al Gore won about a half-million votes more than George W. Bush did.”

Washington Post, December 12: “In the end, Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.7 million votes, or 2 percent of all ballots cast.” (A bunch of WaPo writers have done the same; too many to list.)

International Business Times, December 12: “The latest popular vote totals Monday, as reported by nonpartisan election analysis group The Cook Report, show Clinton garnering 65,746,544 votes compared to Trump’s 62,904,682, a difference of more than 2.8 million votes. In percentages, Clinton’s locked down a plurality of 48.2 percent of the vote and Trump 46.2 percent.”

Mother Jones, December 7: “I figure it’s still worth periodically posting a reminder that far more people wanted Hillary Clinton as their president than Donald Trump.”

Time.com, December 1: “Hillary Clinton’s lead in total votes over President-elect Donald Trump has reached 2,526,184 as ballots continue to be tallied.”

What is the issue here, you ask? One issue is the credibility of major periodicals. When a big-city daily newspaper refers to Clinton’s popular vote lead without mentioning the massive four-thousand-vote lead in California, big newspapers lose even more credibility. Every thinking person who followed the election at all sees that item, or that headline about Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead, and thinks, That’s mainly from California. But the self-styled analysts or pundits do not mention the obvious and valid point. The line from omission to distortion is short.

*I will deal more fully with the Clinton candidacy after the holidays, speaking of denial. It isn’t a very Christmas-like topic.

WaPo report: razor-thin Clinton “edge” even in 50-state hand-picked poll

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WaPo headline reverses the story

My morning paper on September 7 had an unusual feature. The 9-16ths-inch headline on The Washington Post’s front page trumpeted, “Clinton has edge in 50-state poll.” Inside, a special pull-out section on “CAMPAIGN 2016” seemed to expand the story.

Actually, it contradicted the headline.

Let’s start with the easy part–pictures.

WaPo front page September 7, 2016

WaPo front page September 7, 2016

This parti-colored map ran above the fold, spanning eight inches. Take a look at the colors. As shown, the paper designated ten states as “tossups,” purple on the map–Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin. —Georgia? Mississippi? Texas? “Tossups”?

WaPo also designated Alaska and South Carolina reddishly as “Leans GOP.”

The special pull-out had another graphic divided by colors–blue and blueish, red and reddish, purple–with poll numbers. (Page 21) Blue/-ish states totaled 244 electoral votes, red/-ish states totaled 126 electoral votes, of 270 needed to win.

Setting blue and red aside for the moment, that leaves 168 electoral votes in the purple ‘tossup’ column. Here’s where arithmetic, a closer look, and some effort at exactitude might come in handy.

Accuracy, accuracy, and accuracy

According to the Post’s own poll, among the ‘tossup’ states, Trump led in Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Ohio–a total 55 electoral votes. Clinton led in the other six. (Those perennial tossups Arizona and Texas add up to another 49 electoral votes, yielding a total 230 for Trump without going into battleground states, but let’s not get ahead of the story.)

If something about this seems off-kilter, turn to page 24. That’s where readers finally get the breakdown on WaPo’s Survey Monkey numbers. (Yes, they used Survey Monkey–polling only people they had selected. See page 22.)

These were the stats for (selected) “four-way races,” i.e. twelve states with Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein included in the poll. In Ohio, rated a ‘tossup’ on WaPo’s front page, Clinton polled at 37 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. In North Carolina, also rated ‘tossup’ as mentioned, Clinton polled 40 percent to Trump’s 41 percent. In Texas, both candidates polled at 40 percent; in Colorado, both candidates polled at 37 percent (unlike Clinton’s ‘narrow leads’ viz the front pager). In tossup Arizona, Clinton polled at 37 percent, Trump at 39 percent. In Georgia, Clinton 39 percent, Trump 40 percent.

These numbers did not appear on the front page of the paper or the front page of the Campaign 2016 pull-out.

Further, Secretary Clinton polled at 40 percent or less not only in states where that might be expected–Texas, Georgia–but in states touted as winnable for her–Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin. She ran barely better than 40 percent in Florida and Pennsylvania. She polled barely at 50 percent, if that, in Rhode Island. She polled at under 50 percent in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine. In fact, about the only place in the union seemingly favorable for Clinton, outside of bedrock-blue states like Hawaii and Maryland, is Virginia.

This falls short of an Electoral College landslide. It must have been a crushing disappointment to the WaPo personnel who created that hand-picked sample. The entire thrust of the story is how narrow a needle Mr. Trump has to thread, to get to 270. But by the same token–i.e. WaPo numbers–Clinton’s reported “edge” teeters on the brink–a loss of two or three states.

There are other problems with this kind of reporting. Under the sub-heading “Utah is most uncertain state,” the reader finds–that Utah is still solidly GOP, even with a locally popular Libertarian on the ballot siphoning away red votes. Maybe the problem is with the headings.

But the bigger problem is with the nominee. The short story is that Democratic Party insiders and their GOP/Wall Street/insider-media allies selected the worst possible candidate for Democrats, in an anti-democratic process that was worse yet. She’s not a nominee in the sense of having been elected as such by voters. She is a pre-selected candidate who succeeded in being designated as official nominee.

The whole thing was a betrayal. In Barack Obama, the Democrats selected a president who was elected by both the popular and the electoral vote, in the most genuine election in years, probably the first relatively open election since Jimmy Carter won in 1976. Eight years later, the party and the nation should be moving forward, to build on the foundation created by President Obama. Instead, it took a giant slide backward–about 90 percent from jealous/envious passive-aggressive inertia, so far as I can tell.

In a bleak prospect, Clinton might be elected to the White House, with a GOP Congress elected to rein her in–thus giving us a lousy president and a lousy congress. If past patterns hold, that would pave the way for Clinton to make deals–benefiting the GOP, undercutting Dems and the public, with a big cut off the top for herself. And that in turn would set up a worse, and winning, GOP nominee next time.

By the way, remember Senator Mitch McConnell’s open vow, at the beginning of the Obama administration, to oppose President Obama at every opportunity? It will be interesting to find out whether the Clinton team green-lighted McConnell, and who else did.

Update 9/29/16

As of today, Real Clear Politics has Trump up nationally by 4 points in one poll, Clinton up by 1 point in another. A miserable showing for Democrats.

*Full disclosure–as Maryland public records would show, I am a registered Democrat.

 

Sanders’ claim to turnout is valid

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Several commentators have disparaged Sen. Bernard Sanders’ argument that turnout will be vital to Democrats in November and that he can help the turnout. He is right on both counts.

Commentators at MSNBC, CNN and now some of the networks have gotten on a train recently, though–pointing to the undoubted fact that Democratic turnout in primaries this year is lower than in 2008. (Barack Obama ran that year. No one has turned out newly energized voters like President Obama.) They also point out that the Democratic turnout is lower than turnout in Republican primaries, where Donald Trump has gotten the GOP moving. So–they go on to gloat–where is the turnout that Sanders promises to deliver? (Some particularly unappealing and smarmy gloating on this item has come from Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Matthews. No surprise there. Matthews’ wife, Kathleen Matthews, is losing her race for Maryland’s 8th District congressional seat, in spite of locking hips with the Clinton team and its donor base behind the scenes; you can’t expect him to be a good sport–a man who uses the phrase “Washington insiders” with a straight face is hardly going to be an objective observer of the nation’s fortunes. Blitzer and a tiny handful of others at CNN have been drawing envious blood from Obama since moments after the president’s election November 4, 2008. They apparently resent both his and Vice President Biden’s independence of the DC media establishment. Maddow seems long since to have bought in to the notion that careerism=feminism, or something to that effect. In between fawning on Brian Williams, she seems to be pretty much engaged in boosting the most mediocre women she can find in public life.)

But there is a factor at work this year that did not weigh on turnout in previous elections. The factor is “superdelegates.” Regardless of how hard Sanders’ ardent supporters work–and most of his supporters are ardent–Hillary Rodham Clinton and her team quietly sewed up somewhere around 450 party insiders, to paste her into the nomination should she have difficulty with voters.

Senator Sanders

Hint to analysts: if you want to be an analyst, it might help to analyze. Is there any realistic possibility that the mass of offstage superdelegates would not discourage turnout, among any voters who knew about them? Or among voters who just saw the delegate tallies for the candidates, without clarification?

So much for hope and change. The insider campaign against both–again, by ‘Washington insiders’–has been relentless–while it has also been picayune, bigoted, petty, envious and competitive. Money does not mean sense.

Nor, in the media establishment, does it mean rigorous adherence to journalistic standards. (You read it here first.) Any political analyst is intellectually required to clarify those superdelegates, in the public interest. That is not happening.

The accrual of more than 400 superdelegates by the wealth- and foundation-supported Clintons should also have been rigorously and accurately reported as it occurred. That did not happen either.

This process will have to change, and will change. In the narrowest partisan terms, it is disastrous for the Democratic Party. Democrats are living in a dream world if they think that a Hillary Clinton campaign can just skate by a nominee like Donald Trump. Trump has already appealed to independents–and to Democrats. It is unrealistic just to assume that a gravely flawed candidate like Clinton can defeat him. This is a pipe dream, and that’s even before the rest of the information on the private-server emails comes out. The insecurities about Hillary Rodham Clinton as a candidate are already manifest, in the behind-the-scenes efforts to prevent anyone else from even running.

Vice President Biden

This strategy is also being feverishly boosted by the Maddows and Matthews of the media world. Maddow spent a lengthy segment one evening on some whack-job’s push to get a death penalty(?) for gays. The clear implication was that Hillary Clinton is our only firewall against measures such as, as Maddow put it, “executing homosexuals.” Do Maddow and her ilk really think that executing homosexuals would be opposed only by a Clinton? They don’t think a candidate like, for example, Vice President Joseph Biden would step up to the plate? They don’t think Biden would oppose executing homosexuals? Do they really think Jim Webb would not have opposed these ills, if he had been allowed in the field? Lincoln Chafee? Wouldn’t even Gov. Martin O’Malley have opposed executing homosexuals, at least if the polls were going the right way?

Bernie Sanders could crush Trump. But he has to become the nominee to do so.

Meanwhile, when these over-promoted, overpaid, and under-qualified folks joined up behind scenes to paste Clinton into a nomination she has not earned and does not deserve, they took away part of my vote. They will not get the rest of it. I will not be blackmailed into voting for the ‘electable’ candidate. For one thing, she’s not. For another, the blackmail is being pushed by the very people who put us in this situation in the first place. This is not a process, a candidate, or a strategy that can withstand accurate scrutiny.

 

 

Hillary Clinton Would Be Awful for the Democratic Party in 2016

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Clinton as Secretary of State

 

And the Republicans know it.

This post will be short.*

Clinton would be the worst possible choice for Democratic nominee in 2016. Every flaw revealed in the 2008 campaign is still there, not to be ignored in a presidential campaign. Clinton’s one plus is that much of her work as Secretary of State was good; she was part of a good governmental team. But even that work has been compromised. With moral idiocy, Clinton set up a private server for emails. While working for the United States, she used her own email account. So much for benefiting from, and reinforcing, the teamwork of respected professionals. A life in public, and she still does not understand that governmental work belongs to the people of this nation?

Keeping her emails private enabled Clinton to stockpile her writing and correspondence as SecState for future books, of course. Anything to make another few million bucks. (This point has not been made in media commentary about the emails.)

Speaking of money, one strength the Clintons undeniably have is the ability to raise millions. (The fact that I do not understand why people throw money at this unsavory pair is beside the point; they do throw money.) So the Clintons could make partial amends for their thirty years of hysterical selfishness in Arkansas, by continuing to raise money for charity. Instead, as ever with this pair, it is self uber alles. 2000 redux.

And the GOP knows it. Notice how every ‘establishment’ pundit and every GOP public figure has treated Clinton as an inevitability. The tactic kills several American birds with one stone. 1) It denies media attention to every better Democratic candidate. 2) It puts the worst possible face on the Democratic Party. 3) It ensures that most money goes to Clinton, slowing down other potential candidates. 4) It diminishes the gulf between the two major parties, foregrounding the creepy, self-engrossed Clintons and cementing the Dems more firmly to the worst of Wall Street.

The upside for Dems is that the idea of running against ‘Hillary’ has encouraged a multitude of demented candidacies for the GOP nomination. But meanwhile, the GOP has a vested interest in undoing the Obama administration as much as possible, as their only shot at position and money. Promoting ‘Hillary’ is the easiest and cheapest way to do that.

Simple point: the Clintons had thirty years in Arkansas. If they had done a good job, Hillary Clinton would have run for the Senate from Arkansas. If Bill Clinton had been the person he could have been, he would have retired to Arkansas, and been content, like Cincinnatus. But during their THIRTY YEARS in Arkansas, they did as little for working families as they could get away with doing. Their energies were focused elsewhere. And when Democratic voters wanted something better for working families, the Clintons were always there, to throw other figures under the bus, as ‘liberal’.

The ticket our establishment pundits envision in store for us is appalling. I read, but I am one voter among many who will never vote for either a Bush or a Clinton.

 

* I am working on a book that takes most of my writing time.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grover Norquist Lost

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Obama won, Grover Norquist lost

2012 election results are in, and Obama won. President Obama should also win Florida. That means an electoral college tally of 332-206.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent at least $28 million against Democrats, lost.

 

Represented by Chamber of Commerce

American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which spent $1 billion against the president and against Democrats, lost.

Karl Rove lost. Grover Norquist lost. Donald Trump lost. Rudy Giuliani lost. Rush Limbaugh lost. Charles Krauthammer lost. George Will lost. Bill O’Reilly lost.

(Here from YouTube is Rove, on air, trying to dispute the outcome in Ohio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQLV7nqD3CA)

The grotesques lost.

‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ are worse than useless as words. The winners-and-losers language cannot be trusted, anyway, as to validity. The commentators most eager to identify winners and losers self-identify as less eager to nail accuracy; a vulgar mindset characterizes notable non-wizards. I do not want to sound as though I were auditioning to become one of the sillies.

But clearly on election day 2012 some won, some lost.

 

The president

Won:

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden won re-election, and rightly so. They won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. For the first time since 1936, they won re-election with over 50 percent of the popular vote.

FDR

Several deserving Democratic senators won hard-fought re-election in an avalanche of negative advertising, including Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Bill Nelson in Florida, and Jon Tester in Montana.

 

Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren won in Massachusetts, Claire McCaskill won in Missouri, Tammy Baldwin won in Wisconsin, Heidi Heitkamp won in North Dakota, Mazie Hirono won in Hawaii. There are now twenty women in the United States Senate–a record. The senate is better off with such women Democrats.

Alan Grayson won as U.S. Rep in Florida, rightly so.

Tammy Duckworth won for the House in Illinois, in the process defeating the disgraceful Joe Walsh. The swing from awful to good is even bigger than the outcome.

 

Lost:

Lackluster corporate ally Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the author of the Ryan so-called budget, lost. (Rep. Ryan won re-election to the House.)

Rep. Allen West lost decisively in Florida. Way past due, but better late than never.

GOP Senate candidate George Allen lost in Virginia.

Rep. Joe Walsh lost in Illinois.

 

Big money lost.

The Koch brothers, who spent tens of millions on the election, lost.

Sheldon Adelson, who donated tens of millions first to Newt Gingrich and then to Mitt Romney, lost.

The Chamber of Commerce losses and the losses of Rove’s groups, the losses incurred by all the super-PACs massed on the pro-corporate, pro-tax haven, anti-union side of the aisle, are the biggest money losses. But it is worth mention again that wealthy self-funding candidates also lost. Linda McMahon lost in Connecticut; Steven Welch lost to incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania; most others lost in primaries. The national political press could have seen an augury for fall 2012 in the losses of so many self-funders.

Along with the billionaires and millionaires, corporate executives who stepped off the sidelines to bully the political process through their workplaces lost.

Speaking of losses, the long string of candidates who lost the race for the GOP nomination lost again. They did not help Republicans look better in the general election. Remember the parade–the string of fallen candidates from the GOP campaign trail—Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Tim  Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann. None can claim—although that won’t keep them from trying—that the election outcome enhances his individual credibility, or that they enhanced the party’s credibility.

Republicans lost. They lost the presidential race; they lost seats in the senate; they lost seats in the house; and they lost seats in the state legislatures. Only in governorships did the GOP eke out an advantage, and even there, with more to defend, Democrats kept or took five governorships including the hard-fought governorship of West Virginia.

Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lost.

House Republicans lost. They lost their two ugliest members, they lost some of their ‘base’, and once and for all the scorn of establishment Republicans for the anti-abortionists was clarified for all to see.

 

Won:

Democrats won. Not all state tallies are complete, but enough returns are in to clarify a nationwide pattern.

Democrats gained two seats in the senate, giving them the edge 53-45. Of two independents–Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Maine’s Angus King–at least one will caucus with the Democrats. Given the quality of the new Democrats elected, that means the Democrats are stronger now than with the nominal ‘filibuster-proof’ sixty they had in 2009, relying on Joe Lieberman.

Democrats gained at least six seats in the house. In a notable upset, physician Raul Ruiz defeated GOP Rep. Mary Bono Mack in California. (Bono Mack’s husband, Connie Mack, also lost his senate race in Florida.) Dem Pete Gallego beat Quico Consego in south Texas. Lois Frankel beat Adam Hasner in South Florida. If Scott Peters has beaten Rep. Brian Bilbray in California, the gain is at least seven for Dems.

In the states, Dems gained the New Hampshire Executive Council. Democrats flipped at least eight state chambers from Repub to Dem in 2012, including chambers in Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Oregon, losing only two. Early estimates are that Democrats picked up 200 seats in state legislatures, partly making up for the large losses of 2010. Local races parallel the federal and state patterns.

Lost:

Media grotesques lost.

Charles Krauthammer and Rush Limbaugh lost, as mentioned. George Will and Bill O’Reilly lost. Sarah Palin lost. Sean Hannity lost. Dick Morris lost.

The rightwing noise machine lost.

Fox News lost.

Rupert Murdoch lost.

The Wall Street Journal lost. The Chicago Tribune lost.

A host of auxiliary right-wing pundits installed by the newspaper I subscribe to, the Washington Post, lost. David Gergen lost. For that matter, most pundits lost. Dan Balz lost. The WashPost‘s layout editors–whoever composed the unfavorable headlines and picked the disfiguring photos of Obama–lost. George Stephanopoulos’ Round Table on ABC’s This Week lost. Face the Nation lost. Meet the Press lost. Chris Matthews lost.

Many or most of the pollsters–except for Nate Silver–lost.

 

The middle class won. Some degree of tolerance won. Health care won. Social Security won. American labor won. Reproductive rights won. The U.S. automobile industry won. Collective bargaining won. College students won. Mortgage holders won. Banking customers won.

Unfortunately, Paul Ryan won re-election to the House. So did Michele Bachmann. We can’t have everything. Bachmann’s race was tight, though. In theory that should end any discussion of Bachmann as some kind of powerhouse. Still, politically progressives won. Racism lost. Anti-immigrant campaigning lost decisively.

I am not gloating. This is a celebration of improvement, of steps toward a cleaner and healthier body politic. People like Joe Walsh and Allen West never did have any place in public office and should never have gotten a federal office in the first place. Anyone who held the opinion that the election was Mitt Romney’s to win was never qualified to be a political reporter in the first place. Any writer who thought ‘the economy’ an issue that would work in Romney’s favor is unqualified to appear in print. Corporate managers who spent more time throwing their weight around than they did improving their companies never should have been managers in the first place. Corporate management should never have been so pinned to stock price in an imaginary paper market as to neglect product, service and labor in the first place.

Political reporting, like every other kind of reporting, is supposed to shoot for accuracy. So read it here, all you buckaroos and buckaresses who spent a year and a half predicting a ‘close election’ and a ‘late election night’:

  • The presidential race was not close.
  • The battleground states were not razor-thin.
  • Democrats won. It was not fifty-fifty. It was not split-the-difference.
  • Republicans lost. The party has also lost name affiliation among registered voters.
  • Progressives won. Where Democrats lost, it was either a Blue Dog, a Republican-leaning district, or a hard race, sometimes close, where a challenger took on an entrenched incumbent. As mentioned, Alan Grayson won.
  • The right wing lost. As mentioned, Joe Walsh and Allen West lost. So did Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, although their brand of conservatism differs from the ugliness of Walsh and West.

 

more later