Tag Archives: Wisconsin

Recount may add Trump votes

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Update December 6: Clinton supporters in Florida are petitioning for a recount there. Let’s take another look at the numbers in Florida, from the New York Times and that spreadsheet by Cook Political Report. As with Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (the piece below), there are no anomalies that suggest hidden votes for Clinton lurking uncounted in Florida.

Trump leads Clinton in Florida by 112,911 votes, as of now–a narrow win, in a big state. But the vote for “Others” is 297,178–more than twice Trump’s margin, for a total of more than 409,000 people who didn’t vote for Clinton, well outside a margin where a recount might reasonably be called for.

More importantly, those “others’ broke heavily for right-leaning candidates rather than for Jill Stein. As of now, the numbers in the NYTimes page are 207,043 for Gary Johnson; 16,475 for the Constitution candidate; 9,108 for Rocky de la Fuente; and 74,684 for Independent–a total of 307,310. Stein got 64,399.

In other words, any hope for a changed outcome for Hillary Clinton in Florida has to upset or reverse not only the margin between the major party candidates, but also a roughly five-to-one margin in favor of conservative-leaning ‘third party’ candidates. The hope is a null set. It is preposterous, and our news media who ignore the third-party tallies are failing in their duty to the public which has to determine when, and whether, a recount is called for.

[previous post below]

For the record, I support recounts. The right to vote is paramount, it should be an equal right, and tabulating votes accurately is more important than tabulating them fast. The public should be able to observe. Vote in private, count in public.

However, a recount will not only not change the 2016 outcome in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, as the Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton campaigns themselves acknowledge. It is unlikely even that Clinton will net additional votes.

Take a quick look at the numbers for candidates other than Trump or Clinton. Reality check for commentators eager to blame ‘third parties’ for Clinton’s losses: in Michigan, Stein pulled 51,463 votes. But Libertarian Gary Johnson pulled 172,136. That’s a margin of more than three to one for the right-leaning ‘third party’ candidate over the left-leaning ‘third party’ candidate. Yes, the number of votes going to Stein in Michigan is more than the number by which Trump beat Clinton (10,704)–almost five times more. But the number going to Johnson is more than sixteen times greater than the winning margin.

Dr. Jill Stein

Dr. Jill Stein

In Pennsylvania, Stein pulled 49,278 votes. But Johnson pulled 144,536–almost three times as many, and more than twice the margin by which Trump beat Clinton in Pennsylvania (70,779). Trump’s margin as seen exceeded Stein’s votes. Conservative Party candidate Darrell Castle pulled another 21,242.

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate

In Wisconsin, Stein got 30,980 votes–greater than Trump’s net over Clinton of 27,257. But Johnson got 106,422 votes, and the conservative Constitution Party candidate got 12,179. Adding these votes to those for the major party candidates yields a left-ish total of 1,413,190 and a right-ish total of 1,528,068. That’s a margin of more than 100,000 votes (114,868 to be precise, using the unofficial results given so far)–not the eyelash-thin margin screamed by the headlines.

Quick points: First, nothing in this picture suggests that hidden hordes wanted to vote for Clinton and were thwarted. Second, it’s funny how the name ‘third party’ applies no matter how many parties are listed. This dismissing everyone not locked into a major party should be rethought–especially in Wisconsin with its proud populist tradition. Third, even if the Democrats had won by a razor-thin margin in Michigan or the other two states, the thin margin would be shameful. From a small-d perspective, the Clinton candidacy was an embarrassment.

Fourth, blaming Clinton’s loss on a ‘third party’ is exactly what might be expected of the Clintons and their media allies (Rachel Maddow, for example)–but it is hardly progressive. Nor is it accurate. The fact remains that Jill Stein’s vote was substantially smaller in all three states than the votes for the Libertarian, Constitution, and other right-leaning candidates.

Meanwhile, this from Politico:

PROPUBLICA KNOCKS DOWN VOTER FRAUD CLAIMS — “We had 1,100 people monitoring the vote on Election Day. We saw no evidence the election was ‘rigged’ no matter what Stein or Trump say,” the investigative non-profit outlet said in a series of tweets last night. “Electionland had huge amounts of data. 600 ppl monitored social media. We had @LawyersComm call logs. We had 120,000 people texting us. We had 400 partner reporters across the country, including three of the largest news organizations in the U.S. We had voting experts in the room with us and election sources all over the country. We saw plenty of problems: Long lines, broken voting machines, incorrect poll books, confusion abt voter ID laws. But we saw no reason to doubt the results.” [Here, please imagine ‘handclap’ emojis where the ellipses are.] There … was … no … widespread … voter … fraud.” http://bit.ly/2gyBJ0K

It remains unclear why Dr. Stein is pursuing the recount. She did raise almost $7 million for the effort, which is the way to get Hillary Clinton’s attention. Ironically, Clinton has now joined the recount campaign, although Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin did not receive much love from the Clinton campaign in the form of campaign stops or more importantly policy addresses.

Clinton’s participation seems mainly to reflect her personal problems. As long as she can fan the dying ember of a hope that she is adored, apparently, she will keep the ‘election’ going. Again, no one projects that a recount will change the outcome. However, a delay hypothetically could take two states out of Trump’s win column on December 13 or December 19, whichever is treated as the Electoral College deadline.

Abolish the Electoral College? Why?

One problem with the abolish-the-Electoral-College picture is that it is hard to envision these three ‘Rust Belt’ states getting more attention without the prize of Electoral votes than they got in 2016 with a combined 46 Electoral votes, or 17 percent of the total needed to win the White House. As we already know, these areas are not booming.

Recent U.S. population growth

Recent U.S. population growth

Add Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, and Illinois to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and you get 41 percent of the Electoral votes needed to win. First, nothing makes neglecting these states anything but stupid, except for whatever makes it arrogant, self-important, or self-deluded to the point of delirium. Second, to my confreres in the media–if you want to avoid being perceived as elitist, quit using the phrase ‘Rust Belt’. Try losing your job and see how you like it, or watch your entire occupation go under. Wait–that’s already happening . . .

Progressives above all should repudiate this attitude. People who have a hard time finding decent jobs in small towns, open areas, or small cities should not be ridiculed. Nor should they be dismissed from the electorate, which might be the effect of abolishing the Electoral College. Look how well it worked this time.

I despise ridicule directed against any sector of the U.S. (like David Brooks’ comment about ‘gene pools’, for example). A superficial dismissal may rest–superficially–on a careless assumption of moral superiority (racial disparities in the Southeast, Latino poverty in the Southwest, random bigotry in the ‘Rust Belt’; take your pick). So what do the election analysts say about a small city like Binghamton, New York? This was a town where, if you recall, the big employer was IBM. Then IBM left–and now one of the town’s biggest employers is SUNY Binghamton, a nice place but not exactly hiring on the scale of General Motors or U.S. Steel back when. There is much to be said for the locale, from what I hear. You can get a very nice house for $40,000. But where do you find the job to pay for it?

Which Odds Makers Will Get today’s College Bowls Wrong?

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Which Odds Makers Will Get today’s College Bowls Wrong?

Lots and lots of hindsight. Not so much foresight. Once again, betting on college sports has got to be a mug’s game, even aside from the general sleaziness and greasiness of putting money on other people’s bone-breaking from the vantage point of the couch, while fork-lifting plaque into the arteries via fat-filled dips washed down with alcohol. Not to sound like a latter-day Carrie Nation, gentlemen. But really. Google ‘Images’ for ‘bad cholesterol’.

ER care

As of yesterday, remember, the odds on yesterday’s football bowls were as follows:

Tuesday, Dec. 31 bowl games:

  • AdvoCare V100 Bowl: Arizona favored by about a touchdown over Boston College. Uh-huh. Final score: Arizona over BC 42-19
  • Sun Bowl: UCLA is picked over Virginia Tech by almost a touchdown: Final score: 42-12 UCLA
  • Liberty Bowl: Mississippi State favored over Rice: Final score: Miss State 44, Rice 7
  • Chick-fil-A Bowl: Texas A&M favored over Duke by at least two scores: Final score: A&M 52, Duke 48

 

Rice season

Spread predictions here.

That’s four games, with for a change four winners picked. However, three of the picks were so ludicrously undervalued that the prediction bears virtually no resemblance to the game. The Arizona-Boston College game was more lopsided than the score indicates. The UCLA-Virginia Tech game was more lopsided than the score indicates. Even the Mississippi State-Rice game was more lopsided than the score, not an easy feat to pull off with a final 44-7. The fourth bowl–Duke and Texas A&M–was undervalued in the other direction. Duke had an excellent chance of winning up to about the last minute and a half of the game. Arguably, Duke–which racked up 38 points in the first half–should have won. A couple of bad play calls and a wrong non-call on pass interference in the last quarter made a crucial difference in a game where mostly the Aggie defense looked helpless. Couldashouldawouldas aside, Duke predominated, especially in the first half, enough that the predictions in no way represented the game that took place. Duke can go home with nothing to be ashamed of.

There may be a need for more new bowl names in future years. Lopsided Bowl? Wild Card Bowl? Chalk-Up-a-Win Bowl? Beef-Up-Your-Stats Bowl? ‘Consolation Bowl’ is already de facto in use. As said, parody falls short in this context.

Not enough bowls

As of today, 23 games have been played on the NCAA football bowl schedule. Out of 23, six picks have been wrong. Of the winning teams and right picks, ten of the favored, depending on how you count them, were favored too narrowly to be realistic. The prognosticators’ ratio is not improving, although the narrow win-loss tally is.

Going forward

So–on to the next college bowl games: How will the next picks hold up? Happy 2014.

Jan. 1, 2014:

Nothing is a sure thing in sports. Given the youth of the players, there are especially no sure things in college sports, and then there are the massive injuries.

Once again, betting on these is unsavory–and foolhardy. Even a non-expert can see that the picks for the Gator, [Capital One], and Rose bowls are houses built on sand.

For the more consensus views, there is a little more supporting evidence. Outback Bowl sponsor Outback Steakhouse has been advertising a promotion: customers coming in tomorrow (Jan. 2) and mentioning the bowl can get a free coconut shrimp appetizer if Iowa wins, or a free blooming onion appetizer if LSU wins. Since the blooming onion is considerably less expensive to make than the coconut shrimp, it’s a safe bet that Outback sees LSU as more likely the victor.

Today’s question: Who will get today’s bowls wrong?

 

More to come.

 

More on the Romney campaign’s internal polling

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Romney internal polling–myopia rather than rose-colored glasses

I don’t call these post-mortems, but in this election follow-up, The New Republic has disclosed some useful information. The gist is that Mitt Romney’s campaign thought it was likely to win because internal polling at the end said so. The Romney team’s own last-minute projections for six key states showed Romney possibly winning enough electoral votes for victory.

 

Romney and Ryan in Wisconsin

Here, from TNR:

“In an exclusive to The New Republic, a Romney aide has provided the campaign’s final internal polling numbers for six key states, along with additional breakdowns of the data, which the aide obtained from the campaign’s chief pollster, Neil Newhouse. Newhouse himself then discussed the numbers with TNR.”

The six states chosen for outtakes are Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

 

Red states, blue states, purple states by senate representation

The first thing you notice about the Romney internal numbers is that they were nearly right where they focused on votes for Romney. In alphabetical order, here are the states lined up with the Romney campaign’s projections for Romney, and Romney’s actual results:

  • Colorado:            Romney vote projected at 48%. Actual Romney vote 46.1%
  • Iowa:                     Projected Romney vote 46.5%. Actual Romney vote 46.2%
  • MN:                       Projected Romney vote 43.5%. Actual Romney vote 45%
  • NH:                        Projected Romney vote 48.5%. Actual Romney vote 46.4%
  • PA:                         Projected Romney vote 46%. Actual Romney vote 46.7%
  • WI:                         Projected Romney vote 45%. Actual Romney vote 46.1%

The late polls were nearly accurate. In five of the six states, the Romney campaign came within two percentage points of predicting Romney’s actual vote, and in New Hampshire the campaign miss Romney’s actual numbers by only 2.1 percent. In three of the states, the polls were off by less than one percent. One could expound on the Romney campaign’s obliviousness to a key fact about New Hampshire–namely its closeness to Massachusetts, home base or epicenter of Romney’s unpopularity. But the fact remains that most of the Romney team’s numbers were close to the mark. It will be interesting to see the campaign’s late polls for Florida, Ohio and Virginia, if they are ever released.

 

Voting in Florida

Furthermore, the Romney campaign actually underestimated the percentage of the vote that Romney went on to get in three of the states. Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin–percentages highlighted here in red–actually went for Romney in slightly bigger numbers than his own campaign projected in internal polls. This is not wild miscalculation.

Where the Romney team did miscalculate wildly was the Obama vote. This is key: In a presidential election there is more than one candidate running, and dismissing the other major-party candidate the way you would dismiss Virgil Goode is not viable assessment.*

Here are the six states with the run-down on the Obama vote, as calculated by the Romney campaign, and President Obama’s actual outcome:

  • Colorado:            Obama vote projected at 45.5%. Actual Obama vote 51.5%
  • Iowa:                     Projected Obama vote 46.5%. Actual Obama vote 52%
  • MN:                       Projected Obama vote 47.5%. Actual Obama vote 52.6%
  • NH:                        Projected Obama vote 45%. Actual Obama vote 52%
  • PA:                         Projected Obama vote 49%. Actual Obama vote 52.1% 
  • WI:                         Projected Obama vote 49%. Actual Obama vote 52.8%

Again, the underestimates–i.e. all six states–are highlighted in red.

Now the most obvious comment is that Romney’s tacticians made the fundamental mistake of underestimating their opposition, the error warned against by strategists for millennia. However much you wish to despise the person/king/opposition, allowing your assessment to be distorted by your emotions is an elementary error. Machiavelli, whose critics gave Machiavellianism a bad name, would have recognized it. That Machiavelli himself died a despised and forlorn exile is beside the point.

Back to 2012–in regard to the Romney calculations, even hard-nosed numbers crunchers could not see that their numbers re Obama were way off. It did not even strike them as unrealistic that a popular incumbent president was polling, according to their picture, at 47.5 percent in Minnesota and at 46.5 percent in Iowa?

There are several factors at work here.

  • One is ‘demographics’, which as we know did not play well for the GOP in the 2012 elections. Nor should it have. It stands to reason that the people making those well-exposed public comments about immigrants–often basically running against immigration–would be no better at evaluating what they were doing behind the scenes. The same personnel are now scrambling to find new shades of lipstick for the hog, mostly by promoting a few Latino politicians and a few fauxish immigration reforms. Back during the campaign, they kept well away from the people they were characterizing rather than wooing.
  • Another is the millennial generation. It’s not just that cell-phone users tend to be under-polled; it’s that old measures do not always work. WARNING: OVER-GENERALIZATION AHEAD: Aside from Occupy Wall Street, millennials do not tend to be demonstrative. Demonstration with them tends to be a last resort, not a first. They are not vehement at first hue, they do not ask for things stridently. On the plus side, they tend to respect human dignity, they tend to appreciate courtesy, and they tend to let other people have a say. One can imagine how Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich would have fared with this cohort.
  • That leaves the third factor, not explored by TNR, of race. Romney strategists and even Romney pollsters operated in a partial blindness that left them unable to imagine other people voting differently from the way they themselves would vote, and the different race of the president made that back-of-the-eyelids view more plausible. Calling this ‘racism’ does not explain anything. It is a simple facet of the human brain to find difference, or newness, harder to understand than the familiar. Change is so hard to adapt to that even positive change–a promotion, winning the lottery–is stressful.**

For Republican campaigners and campaign operatives, the natural myopia was compounded by their other characteristics, or the related characteristics of their side–a continuing antipathy to genuine information, an unwillingness to see anything positive on the other side, and a corresponding willingness to shout down any unwelcome perception on their own side. These are useful attributes for the politicians who are hired guns for privilege rather than independent thinkers, just as they are useful for the media personalities like them–Limbaugh and Krauthammer et al. These are the qualities that strengthen a Gingrich or a Bachmann to run a campaign as shameful as the policies espoused by the candidate. But for running a national campaign, where winning depends on knowing something outside your own sphere of influence–not so much.

They were hoist by their own petard.

 

*In the interest of full disclosure: according to genealogy research mostly via ancestry.com, Mr. Goode and I may be distantly related.

**[Update Dec. 4: Overt racism was cultivated by the campaign, as we know. Sometimes the overt racism is attributed to blue-collar  voters; this is false sociology. Persons with wealth, status and at least nominal education can and do participate in racist acts and speech.]

Positive harbingers for Obama-Biden

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Pre-election, looking warmer

2012 harbingers

Yet another positive harbinger for the election, from a Democratic and democratic perspective: Citigroup’s CEO just abruptly resigned. Wall Street this fall did a little quiet house-cleaning. Doesn’t suggest that insiders see a wildly lenient Romney-Ryan ticket winning. Rep. Paul Ryan doesn’t seem to see that in his crystal ball, either: he is still on the ballot in Wisconsin, running for reelection to Congress just in case things don’t pan out elsewhere.

 

Ryan with budget

Funny how little attention the hand-wringing liberalish cable commentators have paid to that Wisconsin race.

 

WI challenger Rob Zerban

But then a near-hysterical insistence on closeelectioncloseelectioncloseelection offers little political acumen or illumination.

 

Mad man

Close or not, take a look at some of the hard numbers:

  • by all accounts, the advantage in 2012 early voting is heavily Democratic
  • President Obama outraised Mitt Romney in September, $181 million to $170 million
  • retail sales are up in September, unemployment is down, consumer confidence is up, house sales up, housing permits up; etc
  • Dem Senatorial candidate Tim Kaine is outraising George Allen (R) in swing-state Virginia
  • Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren is outraising incumbent Sen. Scott Brown (R) in Massachusetts in spite of a national lobbyist-superPAC campaign against her
  • compilations of polls and polls of polls still show Obama significantly ahead of Romney in electoral college votes
  • Nate Silver’s micro-tuned statistics continue to predict the win Obama

Even as nominally pro-Democratic commentators keep instilling fear, cherry-picking the most negative opinion polls in order to seem influential, RealClearPolitics makes the picture clear.

RCP, be it noted, accords the incumbent Obama-Biden only 201 electoral votes, and 191 to Romney-Ryan. RCP designates the other 146 electoral votes ‘toss-up’.

That toss-up category includes the following states, in alphabetical order:

What these five ‘toss-up’ states have in common is, among other things, that Obama is ahead in all or most polls in all five of them. Not much surprise there; Obama also carried all of them in 2008. All five also have a history of going Democratic in presidential elections for the past quarter-century. Iowa has voted Republican only once (2004) since 1984. Michigan has voted Dem every time since 1988. Ohio has gone Dem in three of five elections since 1988. Pennsylvania has gone Dem every time since 1988. ‘Swing state’ Wisconsin has gone Dem in every election since 1984.

Jobs minus before, jobs plus after

Meanwhile, Michigan and Ohio are also home to industries that Romney-like policies have damaged. Iowa and Ohio tend to be politically tuned in as state electorates–never a blessing to Romney-type policies. Wisconsin has a history of populism, Pennsylvania of religious freedom, all five states are heartland bastions of the large, self-confident working class called middle class in this country’s sociology.

And as mentioned, every recent opinion poll or almost every recent poll, in all five of these swingy swing toss-up states, puts Obama ahead.

I am beginning to think that the mass media effort to drive every national election to ‘closeness’ bears a strong and unsavory resemblance to price-fixing in retail.

 

May 8 primary results hold interest for Democrats

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May 8th primary more interesting for Dems

The series-of-oddities parade of GOP presidential contests since summer 2011 seems to be over for now, and the May 8 primary results hold some potential for improvement in government at the federal and state level. Quick spot-check below.

Sen. Lugar

Indiana:

  • Most famously, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) will leave the Senate at the end of 2012, after thirty-five years in Washington. Represented as a statesman, Lugar did not question either the Iraq war or trillion-dollar tax breaks for the wealthy under GWBush. Some Pale-Blue-Dog media commentators are spinning this as a political loss for Democrats–oddly, since the GOP senate nominee in Indiana will be State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who filed a losing lawsuit against the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry. Auto parts and supplies are a significant industry in Indiana. Mourdock, a former coal and oil geologist running as an outsider, tried for Congress unsuccessfully three times in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
  • Lugar’s loss to Mourdock has been represented in media almost entirely as a story of Tea-Party-wins-one. Dick Armey of FreedomWorks sent around the same line by mass email. A version of the same narrative has Lugar the statesman driven out by extreme partisanship, faulted for his votes to confirm the president’s Supreme Court nominees, for example. Lugar’s own statement takes this line. No one points out that Lugar’s Senate votes since 2006 may have made sense as political calculation also, given that Obama won Indiana in 2008. Indeed, given not only that Obama carried the state but also that Democratic party affiliation in Indiana exceeded the GOP by nine percentage points, it looks less than wizardly that Dems didn’t bother putting up a senate opponent for Lugar in 2006. Lugar ran unopposed in 2006, but can’t even win his own primary in 2012? –Q whether that’s a major sea change, or another polite major-party bargain to ignore the popular voice.
  • That Lugar’s giving a false home address for decades went unremarked does not speak well either for political participation in Indiana or for national political reporting. If memory serves, Indiana was represented exclusively as a ‘red state’ in the 2008 elections, with no media reportage of the Dem party advantage in the state. Typically, that kind of thing gets reported only after Dems have lost the advantage; no media outlets reported that Dems outnumbered Repubs in Texas, either—until Gallup argued that Obama should have won even more states than he did, in the link above. The bright spot here is that the large media outlets have lost so much credibility in political reporting that most people know to get their information elsewhere.
  • Democrats have shown the sense to field solid candidates in all Indiana congressional districts, contesting some held by the GOP and leaving no current GOP Reps to coast to reelection unopposed. The GOP nominees all defeated Tea Party challenges except for incumbent Marlin Stutzman in the 3rd District, a Tea Partyer himself; he is challenged by Pastor Kevin Boyd (D). Two women House nominees are Democrats, Shelli Yoder in the 9th District and Tara Nelson in Indiana’s 4th District.
  • Indiana’s 5th District has State Rep. Scott Reske (D) facing GOP former U.S. Attorney Susan Brooks. The seat opened up through the retirement of Rep. Dan Burton (R). If Brooks won, she would be the first woman elected to the House by Indiana Republicans in more than fifty years. Brooks is a self-declared ‘anti-choice’ candidate linked to funding Planned Parenthood. One of the GWBush U.S. Attorneys (Southern District of Indiana) not fired, she like Mourdock is receiving heavy anti-labor support.
  • Indiana’s 6th District also has a good House contest, GOP Rep. Mike Pence leaving to run for governor. Bradley T. Bookout is the Dem nominee, a strong contestant in a Republican district against a far-right ‘young gun’ GOPer, Luke Messer. Messer like Brooks has received funding from the anti-labor ‘Citizens for a Working America’, based in Virginia.
  • In the governor’s race, the dubious Pence faces Dem attorney and former state house speaker John R. Gregg. Gregg also hosts an Indiana radio call-in talk show.
  • Unfortunately, the Indiana state legislature is so horrendously gerrymandered that only devoted legwork from the ground up will retrieve anything. State Democrats stupidly engaged in same when they were in office, leaving a field depleted of grassroots credibility for the GOP to move in on and take over in 2010.

 

Renee Ellmers

North Carolina:

  • Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton won the Democratic primary outright to run against GOPer Pat McCrory for governor. The North Carolina governorship has been Democratic for twenty years, although the GOP has money advantage. Top of the ticket is a boost in NC, which Barack Obama carried in 2008. Dems will have to work to keep the Pale-Blue-Dog media from torpedo-ing this one.
  • The Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor is former Director of State Personnel Linda Coleman.
  • More notoriously, of course, an anti-same-sex marriage amendment was added to the NC state constitution. Setting aside larger issues for the narrowly political assessment, this move in other states has yet to augment GOP successes in fall elections following. Nut-right victories are usually followed by general-electorate pullback, a point that has yet to be noticed in most ‘insider’ political commentary. These are not inspirational moves, and they offer nothing for most young voters.
  • Weird-right GOP nominees and incumbents Virginia Foxx in North Carolina’s 5th District and Renee Ellmers in the 2nd face solid Dem challengers—Elisabeth Motsinger and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Steve Wilkins. Foxx is on recent record criticizing people who take out student loans. Foxx, on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, proclaimed that she worked her way through college without borrowing—although her husband did take out some loans. No record of whether Foxx knows about the gap between 2012 college tuition and entry-level pay, or about the difference between 2012 and 1961, when she started college. While Foxx’s early self-support and commitment to her own education are laudable, it might be noted that Foxx has had what Repubs call ‘government jobs’ since 1987. That’s 25 straight years of ‘government jobs’.
  • The Democratic challenger in the 10th District is NC Rep. Patricia Keever. The incumbent is another GWBush appointee, Patrick McHenry. McHenry was among other things one of Karl Rove’s men in the 2000 political campaign. He is another long-time labor-hater, having worked for Bush’s Sec. of Labor, Elaine Chao, as a Special Assistant.

 

Mountaintop removal in WV revisited

West Virginia:

  • Obama did not carry West Virginia before, in either the primary or the general in 2008, and has little chance of doing so this time—even if the mind rejects an image of West Virginians turning out enthusiastically to vote for Mitt Romney. Sadly for it, West Virginia is not a makeweight in presidential politics, and its unimportance this primary season was highlighted by the relative success of a Texas inmate named Keith Judd as the mickey-mouse candidate who got votes. Sadly, the declining population of the state is preyed upon by vested interests. West Virginia is one of the states that most benefited from the New Deal and the Rural Electrification Administration, but any populace that sees the president as a ‘muslim’ gets little chance at a better life now.
  • That said, Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Sen. Joe Manchin are both incumbents, and neither faces a strong challenger. Tomblin’s is conservative Republican Bill Maloney, who has no experience in public office but ran a drilling company and was involved in planning the successful rescue of the trapped Chilean miners. Manchin’s is businessman John R. Raese, who lost to him before in the campaign with the infamous ‘hick’ ad. Raese also lost elections in 1984, 1988, and 2006.
  • Dems nominated two women, Robin Jean Davis and Kanawha County attorney Letitia Chafin, for seats on the West Virginia Supreme Court. Davis is also an incumbent. Reportedly the races will be expensive. The combination of low education levels and a dearth of viable newspapers means that WV, like Tennessee and Kentucky, is targeted by lobbyists against legislation and regulation in the public interest. Fertile fields.

 

Wisconsin:

 

More later