Counting Chickens And Measuring Drapes

The Senate GOP already has its "first 100 days" mapped out when they take over in January, because of course that's inevitable because Democrats won't vote.

Republicans are putting together an agenda for the first 100 days of 2015 in case they win control of the Senate. 

Authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, approving “fast-track” trade authority, wiping out proposed environmental regulations and repealing the medical device tax top their list.


“Those would all be positive things. You could come up with a list of very positive things and all of us are thinking about those,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who is poised to become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee under a GOP takeover.

Other Republicans echoed Corker. 

“Those are four things that could happen that I believe would be great for the economy and enable us to move forward on a bipartisan basis,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said during a Thursday breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. 

GOP senators insist they are not “measuring the drapes” after six years in the minority.

But why wouldn't they be?  Hell, not only are Democrats going to stay home apparently, but they're so tuned out and so oblivious that they don't even know that the GOP is poised to take control of the Senate.  Greg Sargent:

What if a key part of the problem is that many of these voters simply don’t know that Democratic control of the Senate is at stake in this fall’s elections? 

That’s one of the conclusions veteran Dem pollster Celinda Lake reached after conducting new focus groups and polling for the liberal group MoveOn. Lake conducted two focus groups of people from Detroit and its suburbs. One was made up of single white women under 55 and married white women under 35 (millenials). The second was all African American women. These are the same voters who are expected to drop off in many red state Senate contests, too. 

“We were exploring what would motivate them to turn out to vote,” Lake tells me. “One of the things that came up is that these drop-off voters had no idea that control of the Senate was even up for grabs and were even very confused about who controlled it. These voters are very representative of drop-off voters in a lot of states.” 

Lake says the focus groups — and follow-up polling Lake conducted — determined that one message that motivates these voters is that the outcome of the Senate election in their state could decide Senate control. However, that alone isn’t enough to motivate these voters. They also need to be told why it should matter to them which party controls the Senate, Lake adds.

If it's the middle of September and Democrats still aren't even aware that we're going to lose the Senate unless they vote, then the failure of the party message machine is all but complete.  We've got seven weeks to turn this around, and we don't even know why we're fighting.

Jesus wept.