Lundergan in Trouble Again

Looks like the feds have finally dropped the hammer on both the Lundergans, Dem party boss Jerry and his daughter, current KY Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, over major campaign finance violations.

Longtime Kentucky Democratic operatives Jerry Lundergan and Dale Emmons were indicted by a federal grand jury in Lexington Friday for allegedly making illegal contributions to the 2014 U.S. Senate campaign of Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes and then conspiring to cover them up.

Emmons was indicted on six counts and Lundergan was indicted on 10 counts after investigators found they “willingly and knowingly” made corporate contributions of more than $25,000 to Grimes’ campaign and then worked to make false entries in the campaign’s financial records to cover up the contributions.

The indictment alleges that Lundergan and an employee of his company approached campaign consultants and vendors and told them to bill S.R. Holding Co. for work they did for his daughter’s campaign. He then did not seek reimbursement from Grimes’ campaign and only sought partial reimbursement after a grand jury subpoenaed records from Lundergan.

It also alleges that Emmons provided political consulting to the campaign, but billed Lundergan and S.R. Holding instead of the campaign, and was paid with corporate funds. When vendors billed Emmons’ business for campaign services, he was allegedly reimbursed by Lundergan and not the campaign.

The indictment says Lundergan and Emmons concealed the scheme from the campaign, causing them to file false reports with the Federal Elections Commission.

The indictments strike at the heart of the Democratic establishment in Kentucky and raise serious questions about the political future of Lundergan’s daughter, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. Grimes is considering a run for either attorney general or governor in 2019.

Lundergan, 71, has for years led a faction of the Kentucky Democratic Party, taking control of the entire party as its chairman twice: once between June and August of 1988 and again from 2005 to 2007. He later would serve as the architect behind his daughter’s campaigns for secretary of state and U.S. Senate.

Emmons, 66, is a close friend of the Lundergan family and has worked on numerous statewide and legislative campaigns as a political consultant, including Grimes’ 2014 Senate campaign.

At this point the question has to be asked about how much Alison Grimes knew.  And I hate to say it, but compared to Jack Conway and Andy Beshear, Grimes was our best shot at taking down Matt Bevin in 2019.

Bevin jumped into the race last weekend. Before, there was serious speculation as to if he would even bother running earlier in August after this spring's teachers' strike, seeing how unpopular he taking away Medicaid from 10% of the state's population is and how Grimes was in a great position to kick his ass.  She responded yesterday:

Grimes is out with a statement on Facebook: pic.twitter.com/J55rKn1vyk

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 31, 2018

Now that's in the toilet, and I have to say I'm betting Bevin suddenly threw his hat into the ring because he knew this hammer was about to fall.  Kentucky Republicans are already demanding that Grimes all but resign:

.@KYGOP spox calls for Grimes “to recuse herself and her office from any and all election related activities this election cycle and cede control of this fall’s elections to the other 6 members of the State Board of Elections.”

— Joe Sonka 😐 (@joesonka) August 31, 2018

That pressure won't let up, either.  I'm sure Bevin will direct AG Andy Beshear to investigate Grimes well into 2019. Either way, I'm tired of dynastic Democrats losing in this state, and losing for increasingly stupid reasons.  This state can't take another four years of Bevin.  Lives are literally on the line here.

It's infuriating.

Obama's Year Past, Obama's Year Ahead

NPR has been gracious enough to post the full, 43-minute interview that Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep had with President Obama.  If you have a chance to take a look at it, please do.  It's pretty fascinating.
I think the best part is when the President discusses the 2014 election and says that Democrats had many issues to run on in 2014, and chose instead to not run on any of them.  It's as close to an admission of frustration at the stupidity of the party that ran away from Obama because they were scared.

Now the GOP has an overwhelming majority in the House and a pretty solid one in the Senate.  Luckily, Obama is up to the challenge.

The Last Days Of Southern Democrats

Mary Landrieu is fighting for her political career in Louisiana today in the state's Senate runoff, but the reality is Senate Democrats are done in the South for quite some time, and unlike House races, you can't blame Senate losses on gerrymandering. FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten sums up Landrieu's coming demise:

William Thompson of Kansas and Wesley Jones of Washington are former U.S. senators — you get a pass for not recognizing them, they’ve been dead for more than 80 years. But if you’ll be watching Saturday’s Senate runoff between Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and Republican Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, remember their names.

These senators sustained the greatest margin of defeat for an elected incumbent (not running on a third-party ticket after a primary defeat) since the direct election of senators began in the early 1900s. Thompson lost by 30 percentage points in 1918, and Jones by 28 points in 1932.

Landrieu probably won’t overtake Thompson and Jones, but she could be headed toward a top 10 historic defeat.

The FiveThirtyEight model projects her losing the runoff 99.8 percent of the time, and by a 57.8 percent to 42.2 percent margin. That’s mostly based on polling, which can be unreliable in a low-turnout runoff.

What else do we know? The early voters in the Louisiana runoff have been vastly more Republican-leaning than early voters in last month’s election. And while whites were only 65 percent of early voters in November, they have been 70 percent for the runoff. Registered Republicans were only 34 percent of early voters in November, but they’ve been 39 percent of early voters for the runoff.

If this change in voter makeup holds on Saturday, it’s obviously very bad news for Landrieu. Assuming she wins the same percentage of white voters as Democratic candidates did in November, she’ll lose the runoff by roughly 60 percent to 40 percent, or about what the model forecasts.

Landrieu's loss will leave Florida's Bill Nelson as the last remaining Democratic Senator from a Southern state, and Mark Warner if you count purple state Virginia.  Both these senators are conservative as well.

Warner survived, and Bill Nelson is good until 2018, but outside of that in 2016 it's going to be a lot harder than liberals are willing to believe to gain seats in the South.

And yes, Landrieu is toast.  Let's be honest here.  She sold the party out for Keystone XL and will lose by an even larger margin as a result.  No sympathy for her, but definite sadness for the Democrats.  We've got a lot of work to do if we ever want to win either chamber of Congress back.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Team WIN THE MORNING asks:

Does Mary Landrieu have a prayer?

No.

She's going to lose by double digits and end up working for an energy lobbyist firm anyway because of Keystone XL, which will pass the Senate as it did the House but get vetoed.  Then she'll work to get it approved by the State Department anyway some time next year, depending on if Nebraska's Supreme Court blocks the routh through the state or not (it won't.)

Thanks for playing.

GOP Voter Suppression Worked

Welcome to the new Jim Crow era, folks.  Disenfranchisement of millions of voters is now a reality nationwide. WaPo's Catherine Rampell:

The days of Jim Crow are officially over, but poll-tax equivalents are newly thriving, through restrictive voter registration and ID requirements, shorter poll hours and various other restrictions and red tape that cost Americans time and money if they wish to cast a ballot. As one study by a Harvard Law School researcher found, the price for obtaining a legally recognized voter identification card can range from $75 to $175, when you include the costs associated with documentation, travel and waiting time. (For context, the actual poll tax that the Supreme Court struck down in 1966 was just $1.50, or about $11 in today’s dollars.)

A hundred bucks just to vote?  But doesn't the state pay for it?  Sure, if you can go through the hardship process to prove you can't afford it, which of course takes months.  The new poll taxes are certainly real enough to keep millions from voting, and that could have affected the 2014 elections:

In the meantime, some ­back-of-the-envelope calculations from Wendy Weiser — director of the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice — should at least give us pause: Right now, it looks like the margin of victory in some of the most competitive races around the country was as big as the likely “margin of disenfranchisement,” as Weiser puts it. That is, more people were newly denied the right to vote than actually cast deciding ballots.

Let that sink in.  More people were disenfranchised this year due to new Voter ID laws than the margin of victory for Senate and/or Governor's races in some states.

Take, for example, Kansas. 

In the state’s nail-biting gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Sam Brownback bested his Democratic challenger, Paul Davis, by a mere 33,000 votes out of nearly 850,000 cast. Now, compare that with the estimated effects of Kansas’s new restrictions on voting. 

We know that more than 21,000 people tried to register but failed because they lacked the necessary “documentary proof of citizenship” required by a new Kansas law. The state’s separate, strict voter ID law also had an effect: Applying findings from a recent Government Accountability Office reportthat examined how the voter ID law affected the state’s turnout in 2012, Weiser estimates that it probably reduced turnout this time around by about 17,000 votes.

38,000 votes disenfranchised.  Davis beat Brownback by 33,000 votes.

Weiser finds similarly troubling results for close races in other states with restrictive voting laws, including North Carolina (where the U.S. Senate race was decided by about 47,000 votes, or 1.6 percentage points, in favor of the Republican candidate) and Florida (where the governor’s race was decided by about 66,000 votes, or 1.1 points, also in favor of the Republican).

Yes, 2014 turnout was low in blue states with no voter suppression laws.  That doesn't mean that voter suppression laws in red states didn't have an effect in turnout in those states and the races in them.

And even more voter suppression laws go into effect for 2016.

Won't that be fun?

Last Call For The State Of Play

This month's Pew Research poll is up on the state of American politics in the wake of the GOP wins last week, and they're very informative.  First of all, while Democrats want President Obama to work with Republicans, Republican want Congress to tell President Obama to go to hell, effectively the same place things were in 2010.



Secondly, nearly half of Latino voters see no difference between President Obama and Republicans on immigration reform legislation.




Food for thought, and much more at the link.

The Real 2014 Election Winners

Let's not forget that the real winners in last week's elections were the billionaire Republican donors who bought eight new Senators for their oligarchy.

To get from the 2012 doldrums to the 2014 victory, GOP groups went through significant transformations. The network of groups backed by David and Charles Koch started buying attack ads with a new super-PAC instead of the nonprofit it used two years ago. The upside for them is the operation is more efficient (tax rules require nonprofits to spend at least 50 percent of their budget on nonpolitical activity, so every dollar on TV political ads must be matched with nonpolitical work). The downside is donor names are disclosed.

Perhaps the greatest example of a turnaround is Rove's American Crossroads. The group was the biggest loser two years ago, dumping more than $120 million into campaigns and watching 10 of the 12 Senate candidates it backed go down in defeat. This time Rove's group won 8 of the 11 Senate races where it made investments.

Crossroads went on a well-publicized soul searching mission last fall, including a donor meeting that kicked off the week of the government shutdown in 2013--an event that infuriated the business community. Despite the group's efforts to improve it's image, big checks were slow to come in. Over the summer Republicans were outspent in key races, Crossroads President Steven Law said in an interview. "Many of our candidates hit Labor Day and were underwater with their image," Law said. 

Unlimited money made all the difference this year.

The donor freeze started thawing in September when polling began to tighten in a number of races and big-names such as Sheldon Adelson started opening their wallets. He wrote a $10 million check to Crossroads GPS in September, a nonprofit arm of the Rove organization. GPS, as a nonprofit, is not required to disclose its donors. Adelson's windfall was leaked to the news media. "Typically donors who support Crossroads are pretty sophisticated consumers of political information," Law said. "My guess is donors paid attention to what they saw on sites like Real Clear Politics."

The group scraped together $36 million to put into television for senate races in the last 90 days of the campaign, according to figures provided by Crossroads. It was the lead spender in Colorado, Arkansas and Alaska, where GOP Dan Sullivan is about 8,000 votes ahead of Democrat Mark Begich.

And money buys cooperation.

However, resources weren't arriving evenly or predictably. That forced Crossroads and some of the other GOP groups to cooperate this year in ways they've never done before. One example came in October when Crossroads realized there was a "hole in our budget" for Colorado, Law said. 

Law emailed Brain Baker at Ending Spending Action Fund, the super-PAC backed by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and the two worked out a deal—the Ricketts group would go up on the air and continue pounding incumbent Democrat Mark Udall while Crossroads took a week off. "Ending Spending filled a gap," Law said. "The take away for all of us was sharing information and strategy was smart for all of us." Udall lost to Republican Cory Gardner. 

Ending Spending took the lead in other places, including Georgia where Republican David Perdue beat back Democratic challenger Michelle Nunn, in a race that was widely thought would go to a runoff.

So these GOP billionaires joined forced and coordinated their attacks worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  As a result, Democrats were utterly crushed across the country.

There's a lesson here if Democrats wish to choose to learn it.  You'd better believe the 2016 ads designed to depress voter turnout are already starting too.

Billionaire Republican donors bought Congress outright with this election.  If they get the White House as well, this country is done.

And it doesn't look like anyone can stop them unless we vote.  While you still can, that is.

Too Turned Off To Turnout

The 2014 midterm election turnout results are grim indeed.  At 36.4%, it's the worst turnout since 1942.  No wonder Republicans did so well.  PBS Newshour:

Final numbers are still being tallied, but at this point it looks pretty clear that turnout in these midterms was the lowest overall in 70 years. Turnout of the voting-eligible population was just 36.4 percent, according to the projection from the United States Elections Project, run by Dr. Michael McDonald at the University of Florida. That’s down from the 41 percent that turned out in 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1942 for lower numbers when turnout in that midterm was just 33.9 percent. They had a pretty good excuse back then — many adult-age Americans were preoccupied with fighting in a world war.

States with competitive races saw increased turnout, but the rest of the country didn't bother to show up at all.

Turnout actually increased in 14 states, plus D.C., from 2010-2014. In 10 of the 14, there were competitive to potentially competitive Senate races. In nine of the 14, there were governors’ races. Here’s where turnout increased, ranked by biggest increase: 

1. Louisiana: +12.9% (38.9%-43.9%)
2. Nebraska: +10.1% (37.5%-41.3%)
3. Arkansas: +9.9% (37.5%-41.2%)
4. Wisconsin: +9.4% (52.0%-56.9%)
5. Maine: +7.4% (55.2%-59.3%)
6. New Hampshire: +6.8% (45.7%-48.8%)
7. Alaska: +6.6% (51.9%-55.3%)
8. Washington, D.C.: +4.8% (28.9%-30.3%)
9. Colorado: +4.7% (50.6%-53.0%)
10. Kentucky: +4.2% (42.4%-44.2%)
11. North Carolina: +3.8% (39.2%-40.7%)
12. Florida: +3.4% (41.7%-43.1%)
13. Kansas: +2.6% (41.7%-42.8%)
14. Iowa: +1.4% (49.9%-50.6%)
15. Oregon: +0.2% (52.6%-52.7%) 

It was down, though — and by a lot in many places — in 36 others. Here are the top 10 biggest decreases: 

1. Missouri: -27.4% (44.5%-32.3%)
2. Washington state: -27.3% (53.1%-38.6%)
3. Delaware: -27% (47.5%- 34.5%)
4. California: -25.5% (44%-32.8%)
5. Indiana: -24.5% (37.1%-28.0%)
6. Oklahoma: -23.2 (38.8%-29.8%)
7. Nevada: -23% (41.3%-31.8%)
8. Alabama: -22.1% (43%-33.5%)
9. Utah: -20.7% (36.3%-28.8%)
10. Mississippi: -19.7% (37%-29.7%) 

Significantly factoring into the overall decrease because of its population was California, which despite a governor’s race was off by a quarter of its 2010 participation. Also factoring in — Ohio (down almost 20 percent), as well as New York and New Jersey, which were both down about 17 percent. Even Georgia, despite its hotly contested Senate race, was down 14 percent. And for Democrats looking for what went wrong in blue states like Maryland and Massachusetts, turnout was down in those states by 10 percent as compared to 2010.

 The bottom line is no matter how you look at it, Democrats didn't show up to vote.

If that doesn't change in 2016 and 2018, this country's as good as done.

Your Sunday Long Read

This week's Sunday Long Read is Joe Sonka's postmortem on the Grimes campaign, and how she lost by 16 points in the space of only a couple of weeks.

But at the very least, Grimes had an opportunity to make Tuesday’s election competitive, and the overarching reason she didn’t give herself that chance was the hermetically sealed bubble in which Grimes’ intellect and personality was locked by her campaign. Her campaign repeatedly touted how “disciplined” she was, never going off script and saying something that could end up in an attack ad. Some extent of discipline is needed for any campaign, but they took this to an extreme that ended up defining her as a candidate and left many wondering who she was, what she believed, and whether she was up for the job. And any young, relatively unknown candidate presenting herself as a mostly blank slate is especially vulnerable.

Do read the whole thing.   If you want to know exactly how Kentucky Democrats blew the best chance they ever had to unseat Mitch the Turtle, well, this is the best article I've read of its epitaph.  Grimes's refusal to say if she voted for Obama or not pretty much turned a six-point loss into a sixteen-point one.

And the best part is we get to go through all of this next year here as Gov. Dinosaur Steve's job is up for grabs in 2015 between Dem AG Jack Conway and GOP Ag Secretary James Comer.

Last Call For Burying The Lede

Next time somebody yells LIBERAL MEDIA IS IN THE TANK FOR OBAMA let them take a look at this little bombshell that should have cost Joni Ernst the election.

Gretchen Hamel, a campaign spokeswoman for Joni Ernst's U.S. Senate campaign, was arrested on Oct. 29 for operating while intoxicated and resigned the morning after the incident.

West Des Moines police found Hamel passed out behind the wheel of her vehicle after crossing lanes and driving her car over a curb on the 6100 block of Beachtree Drive at about 10:30 p.m., according to a police report.

An Ernst campaign aide on Thursday said that Hamel resigned the morning after the incident.

"This is a personnel matter which we will not discuss in the press. We wish Gretchen nothing but the best and appreciate her efforts," said Ernst campaign manager Jon Kohan in a statement.

Hamel did not return multiple attempts to reach her Thursday.

So an Ernst campaign spokesperson gets a DWI on October 29th.  You know, before the election.  We're only hearing about it now, after the election.  Which means our "liberal media" sat on this story that could have damaged a Republican somehow for a week.

Funny how that works out.

Election 2014 Winners And Losers

Time for some brutally frank words about the election, who came out on top, and who faceplanted on the stage.  Time to document the atrocities, as they say:

The Winners

Tea Party Pretenders Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner
These two snow-jobbed not only their states, but the nation as well. A pair of Teabagger fists in velvet gloves, they ran masterful campaigns against bad candidates and won easily, much like Rand Paul did four years ago. The Villagers ate them up and Colorado and Iowa, like Kentucky, are going to find out just how embarrassing Senators can be.  Six years is going to be a long, long time for the voters in these two states.

Actual Senate Majority Leader Ted Cruz
Mitch may get the shiny job title and Harry Reid's office, but the guy actually running things in the upper chamber is going to be Ted Cruz and his Tea Party Circus. Cruz's 2016 chances hinge on how much chaos he can cause by becoming a spinning tornado of red state red meat, and there's going to be a lot of it flying around over the next two years.

Obstruction And Gridlock
Republicans proved beyond a doubt that they can now get away with any sort of bad behavior that hurts the country and the middle class, and that the people that actually bother to show up to vote will never punish them for it. They'll just blame That One.  Why the hell would Republicans start compromising now?  They're winning, and that's all that matters.  If they can keep the country broken to the point of mass voter apathy, 2016 will be a cake walk for them and they know it.

FOX News
The Age of Obama has been very, very good to Roger Ailes and his propaganda squad.  Loading up for bear for 2016 with guaranteed ratings for the next two years means they'll be able to pick all the fights they want to.  You thought they hated Obama before?  You ain't seen nothin' yet, kids.

Chris Christie
Head of the Republican Governor's Association, on top of being the Villagers' sentimental favorite, and just proved he can make winners.  GOP picked up governor's mansions in Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland(!!?!?) and defended in Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin and Kansas, all races they were supposed to lose. Like it or not, "Sit down and shut up" Christie gets credit for being The Asshole Who Wins. 

The Rich
Of course.  Best couple billion ever spent to get people not to vote.

Hillary Clinton
Yes, Hillary Clinton.  All of the above winners need an enemy, after all, and Obama won't be President forever (as much as they'd love it.) No matter what she actually does, she's the one all the GOP will be running against. She will be known by the enemies she makes.

The Losers

Steve Israel, Michael Bennet, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz
The head of the Dems' House re-election committee, Senate re-election committee, and DNC chair, respectively.  All need to be removed from those positions by the end of the week.  Israel in fact has already tendered his resignation as his Blue Dog candidates for House were destroyed in the election. But Bennet's head needs to roll too for his epic Senate foul up and Wasserman Schultz cannot be replaced quickly enough.  Bennet especially needs to get tossed out on his ass, as he was the "genius" behind the Bannock Street Project, the Dems' turnout engine in 2014.  Guess what?  Worst turnout in nearly a century, Mike.  Your ass needs to be gone in a heartbeat. That's the real house cleaning the Dems need to do.

Martin O'Malley
The Maryland governor and prospective 2016 White House candidate ended his Presidential run Tuesday when his hand-picked successor and Lieutentant Governor went down in flames to a Republican.  Instead of being on the road testing the waters for 2016, he should have been taking care of business in his own damn state.  The complete opposite of Chris Christie, which makes him a truly awesome human being, but a loser of a political maestro.

John Boehner
Congrats, Orange Julius!  You win two more years of riding herd on a pile of writhing hate-filled rabid beasts who all want to destroy you!  Good luck with that.

Mitch McConnell
Congrats, Old-Age Mutant Nimrod Turtle!  You win two more years of riding herd on a pile of writhing hate-filled rabid beasts who all want to destroy you!  Good luck with that.  Also, do you know that Ted Cruz has your job?

Rand Paul
You're not Ted Cruz, and Ted Cruz has Mitch's job.  Also, good luck with your crazy dad.  Also, since Ketucky Democrats kept the state House, you're going to have to decide whether or not you really want to run for President or Senate in 2016, because you can't do both.  Please do the former, so I can be rid of you for good.

Jury's Still Out On...

President Obama
Depends on what he does on immigration executive action, how the war against ISIS goes, and how many veto pens he has ready to go.  The lesson here however is betting against Obama usually ends in tragedy, something both Republicans and Democrats will re-learn in the next two years.

MSNBC
I've basically stopped watching them, but they are a necessary counter to FOX News.  They are terrible at being that counter, but they're still necessary.

Voter Suppression Laws
Near record low turnout for a midterm sure shows how effective they are in the South, but that happened too in blue states like California, Oregon and Colorado where voting is super easy.  The best voter suppression is voter depression.

Make your thoughts known in the comments, I want to hear from you guys.

The Ugly Morning After

A brutal, brutal night for the Democrats last night.  The polls badly underestimated what was effectively a GOP wave.

While Brown didn't get swept up in the wave, virtually every other close race is being won by Republicans. Consider:

• Republicans are winning the vast majority of toss-ups in the races for governor and for Senate — including Cory Gardner in Colorado, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, David Perdue in Georgia and Pat Roberts in Kansas. In fact, New Hampshire is basically the one toss-up the GOPhasn't won.
• Former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, who virtually nobody gave a chance to come anywhere close in the Virginia Senate race, is currently within half a point of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).
• Republican Larry Hogan is currently leading the Maryland governor's race — a race he wasn't supposed to — by nine points with just more than half of precincts reporting.
• Another Democrat who was supposed to win easily, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, currently leads by less than two points against a completely unheralded opponent whose name not even The Fix knew before tonight.
• Longtime Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), whose race was rated as safe by virtually all handicappers, is tied at 50 percent with 99 percent of precincts reporting.
• Another incumbent in a supposedly safe district in Maryland, freshman Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.), currently trails Republican Dan Bongino by two points with 57 percent of precincts reporting.
• Targets the GOP has long targeted, like Reps. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) and John Barrow (D-Ga.), have finally lost.

Final tally:  GOP needed 6 seats to retake the Senate and got 8, plus likely two more when Alaska finally comes in and Louisiana's runoff is settled, for what will probably be a ten-seat pickup.

The reason?  Turnout failed miserably, according to the exit polls.  Dems won women 53-46%, but lost men 55-42%.  The electorate for 2014 was a whopping 75% white, and Dems lost white voters by 20 points.

Two-thirds of voters in 2014 over 45, 75% were 40 or older.  Millennials stayed home.

Black voters showed up, they made up 12% of the electorate, and went 89% for Dems.  But Latino voters stayed home.  They made up only 8% total of the electorate, and a third of them voted for the GOP.

Dems lost white women by 12 points.  They lost white men by 30 points.

That's your ballgame.  Turnout nationally was lower than 2010.  

The demographic mix of young, minority and women voters that twice helped elect Obama to the White House never was going to be as robust in a midterm election Yet the fall-off from the level of support the president enjoyed just two years ago was a major factor in the Democratic loss of the Senate.

Even when compared to the last midterm election in 2010, the American electorate Tuesday was older, exit polls show.

Those 65 and older represented a quarter of the national electorate, up from 21 percent four years earlier. Democrats sought to turn out younger voters, but that didn't happen nationally. The share of those 29 and younger was identical to 2010. The proportion of the electorate represented by Hispanics–8 percent–was identical to 2010. Turnout among black voters increased by a percentage point to 12 percent this year, and Asian voters increased by a single point as well, to 3 percent.

Republicans did even better than they did four years ago.  We stayed home like chumps.  That's your answer.

Barack Obama In The Runoff Man

Liam Donovan over at Ace of Spades Decision Desk brings up a very important point should tonight's elections in Louisiana and Georgia go to a runoff (as expected).  Will President Obama's post-election immigration decision affect these races?

After delaying his much-anticipated administrative action to spare vulnerable Democrats in the November elections, the President has promised to move on executive orders to legalize or otherwise stop the deportation of undocumented immigrants. He is expected to deliver on this promise during the lame duck, and with Republicans looking increasingly likely to take the Senate, time will be of the essence. Rumors suggest that he may push the move into December to spare Landrieu, a scenario conspicuouslyaccommodated by the demands of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. All of which points to a late December lump of coal in Nunn’s stocking to compliment the unwelcome gift that Obama gave her on talk radio last month. If the scale of Obama’s ambitions are anywhere near what the immigration hawks at Brietbart have suggested, Nunn would be dead in the water. In an economically fragile state where outsourcing attacks have surelydrawn blood, Georgia voters will not take kindly to anything seen as “executive amnesty.” 

Of course, Nunn could still win outright on election night, which would almost certainly be her best chance to put this race away. She benefits from a united Dem front, sharing a ticket and turnout operation with 4 CBC members (3 of whom represent majority-minority districts), a competitive gubernatorial nominee in state Senator Jason Carter (Jimmy’s grandson), and the last remaining southern Blue Dog in John Barrow. This broad-based synergy affords Nunn her best chance to summon the 30 percent African-American turnout she needs to have a chance, while at the same time attracting 30 percent of white voters. This math would be required to get over the 47 percent hump that Democrats bumped into in 2008. While Nunn is a far better recruit than the bland Martin, it is far from clear that she will be able to better his Obama-driven numbers, even with favorable demographic shifts in the interim. The President himself couldn’t match his 2008 showing campaign despite turning out a greater share of Georgia’s African-American vote during his re-election. Perdue has proved to be his own worst enemy in this race, giving Nunn a puncher’s chance of an outright win, but recent polls have shown him rebounding to the precipice of 50 percent.

In other words, if you're a fan of President Obama taking executive action on immigration, you should want Michelle Nunn to get 50% +1 tonight and obviate any need for a runoff.  You should want Landrieu to win outright in Louisiana too.  If both runoffs are avoided, then expect action sooner rather than later.

It's political, yes.  But that's how this shakes out.  That Georgia runoff especially would delay any action for at least two months, and you'd better believe the GOP will be running against OBAMNESTY the whole way.

The Once And Future Rand

MSNBC's Benjy Sarlin reminds us that the most important races in Kentucky today may not be Alison versus Turtle, but which party ends up controlling the Kentucky State House in Frankfort, and the aswer will have a direct impact on what Sen. Rand Paul does in 2016.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who is openly considering a presidential run, is not on the ballot this time, but his state’s legislative elections have enormous implications for his political future, however. Under Kentucky law, candidates are not allowed to run for two offices simultaneously, meaning that in order to run for president he would have to give up his seat in the Senate. Republicans are eager to change the law to accommodate him, but Democrats control the state house of representatives and aren’t having it. The GOP has been trying for years to flip the chamber and Paul is doing his part, but if they come up short the senator will have a hard decision to make about whether he wants to abandon his influential perch in Washington for a difficult presidential bid.

Right now the Kentucky State House is 54-46 Dems.  If the GOP can pick up 5 or more seats, then they can conceivably pass such a law.  That would put it in the hands of Dinosaur Steve for a possible, but his term is up in 2015.  That could mean that if a Republican wins in 2015 a new law could be in place in early 2016.  How soon Paul would need to decide would be one factor, given that campaigning for 2016 will effectively start Wednesday.

How that all shakes out, I'm not sure.

Last Call For Our Good Friends In Tel Aviv

Reminder tonight, via Emily Hauser and as with 2012, the Israeli government is actively campaigning for the GOP in the 2014 midterm elections.  Haaretz's Barak Ravid:

It’s no secret that Netanyahu and his aides are praying for control of the U.S. Senate to fall to the Republicans, who already hold the majority of the House of Representatives. Based on recent U.S. polls, there’s a fairly good chance those prayers will be answered. However, Netanyahu won’t break open any champagne prematurely. He did that two years ago, before the presidential elections, only to see his favored candidate, Mitt Romney, lose to incumbent President Barack Obama. 

White House staffers don’t need the National Security Agency to guess what results Netanyahu would like to wake up to on Wednesday morning. They believe Netanyahu could integrate well in Congress as a Republican senator from Texas or North Carolina. They know that his envoy, Dermer, is investing most of his time lately meeting with Republican lawmakers, and they also remember that casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, Netanyahu’s patron and the publisher of his mouthpiece, Israel Hayom, shelled out $100 million to try to defeat Obama. 

Speaking of Dermer and Adelson, a few months ago U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice met with the leader of one of the major American Jewish organizations. When the latter asked Rice why she hadn’t met with Dermer. Rice responded, with her characteristic sarcasm, “He never asked to meet me.” 

“Besides, I understood that he’s too busy traveling to Sheldon Adelson’s events in Las Vegas.” 

Rice was referring to Dermer’s exceptional attendance as guest of honor at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in March. That event served to prove to Obama’s aides that despite the “new leaf” Dermer had promised when he arrived in Washington only a few months earlier, he continued to dabble in American domestic politics as a sympathizer with the red, Republican side.

The fact that Israel is actively trying to affect US elections is no actual secret, but it's nice to remember that if both parties are the same, why does Bibi and his Likud Party want Obama out of the way so badly, to the tune of tens of millions and an ambassador at GOP fundraisers?

Not all the Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers are in the US, or are even Americans.

Meanwhile In Louisville

Reminder: here in Kentucky there is no GOP racism towards African-Americans, there is no GOP War on Women, and both parties are the same.

Kentucky Republicans, who are trying to win control of the state legislature on Tuesday, may have underestimated Ashley Miller.

“I think they just said, ‘Oh she’s young, she’s brown, You don’t have to worry about her,’” said the 30-year-old nurse practitioner, who is running for state representative in the state’s 32nd district, in East Louisville. She would be the first black woman in the Kentucky legislature in 14 years; women currently make up only 18% of the assembly overall.

But Republicans seem worried indeed. In September, a website anonymously surfaced calling Miller “Trashley Miller,” singling out her job at Planned Parenthood for its connection to abortion. Miller is prochoice and and provides options counseling for pregnant women, among other services, but Planned Parenthood in Kentucky does not provide abortion services. It also pointed to her modeling career, which included appearing on the cover of a local rap group’s mix tape. The website referred to the group, Nappy Roots, as “a popular gangster RAP group,” a characterization that doesn’t match the group’s alternative image but seems to play on racial fears. (It’s unclear why rap was in all-caps.)

“There were several people in the community that felt like it was a dog whistle of sorts to remind the voters that I am a minority woman,” Miller said.

More recently, a supporter reached out to Miller, she told msnbc, to tell her she had gotten a robocall asking her if she would vote for Ashley Miller if she “knew that on my previous modeling Web site that I advertised to model lingerie in men’s homes for money.” Miller says that’s false. The call also attacked Miller’s Planned Parenthood affiliation.

You know when Republican say us black people need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make something of ourselves?

Miller was recruited by Mary Lou Marzian, a Democrat in the general assembly who first met her when Miller keynoted a Planned Parenthood event.

“She just blew me away,” Marzian told msnbc, saying Miller was “just poised intelligent, showed compassion for the women she served. I said, ‘This woman needs to run for office.’ Women just need to get other women out and recruited to run. A lot of women feel intimidated, we’re not smart enough, or we can’t do it. We wait to be asked. The men are never gonna ask you to run.”

All that was before Marzian knew how much Miller had overcome. Growing up in the West End of Louisville as the daughter of then-crack addicts, Miller’s family sometimes lacked electricity. “There was some times we didn’t have food,” Miller said. “There were times my dad would get food from a dumpster or would steal it from a local Thornton’s up the corner.”

Support from her grandmother, as well as competing in pageants and playing basketball, helped Miller find her way.

Supposedly this is exactly the kind of woman Republicans say we should be.  And this is how they're treated as a result.

So Where Do We Stand?

Heading into tomorrow, the final Senate predictions are on the table for the pundits:

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has the GOP chance at 74%, picking up 7.5 seats.

Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium pegs the GOP at 65%, with 6 seats.

NY Times' Leo model has the GOP chance at 70%, with 7 pickups.

WaPo's Election Lab gives the GOP a 96% chance, with 8 seats gained.

HuffPo's Pollster forecast has GOP Senate control at 77%, with 7 more seats.

Finally, Real Clear Politics has the GOP picking up 7 seats.

Most of the disagreement comes as to which party Greg Orman would caucus with, so there's some hedging on that.  Pollster says there's a 1 in 9 chance Orman would get to decide who controls the Senate, but don't overlook Angus King flipping parties either in Maine.

But all of the major poll models have the GOP gaining the Senate.  It's not a done deal (unless you believe WaPo) but the general consensus is that the proverbial Rubenesque diva is maintaining light vocal chord exercises for her final aria of the evening.

The thing is there's a thin line between the GOP getting seven seats, and the GOP getting five seats and the Dems keeping the Senate. Most likely there will be runoffs in Georgia and Louisiana anyhow, and should the independent Orman win as well, we may not know who controls the Senate until mid-December.  This is my gut feeling, that the GOP will pick up five seats, Orman will win, and Louisiana and Georgia go to runoffs.

As far as the House goes, well, TPM offers six races to watch.  General consensus there is that the GOP will pick up around the same number of seats they will in the Senate, so if it starts looking like the Republicans will gain 10 or more House seats, it's going to be a long night tomorrow in the Senate.

We'll see.

Last Call For Judicial Overreach

And in about 30 seconds, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Judith French makes the best case I have ever seen about why judges should not be elected by partisan ballot.

An Ohio Supreme Court justice says she was talking judicial philosophy — not politics — when she addressed a Republican crowd about the court serving as a “backstop” for decisions made by GOP officeholders. 

Justice Judith L. French, an appointed Republican seeking to retain her seat in the Nov. 4 election, said her remarks at a GOP rally in Powell did not cross the ethical line that counsels judges to be cautious about partisan remarks. 

At a Saturday event at which she introduced Republican Gov. John Kasich, French said, “I am a Republican and you should vote for me. You’re going to hear from your elected officials, and I see a lot of them in the crowd. 

“Let me tell you something: The Ohio Supreme Court is the backstop for all those other votes you are going to cast. 

“Whatever the governor does, whatever your state representative, your state senator does, whatever they do, we are the ones that will decide whether it is constitutional; we decide whether it’s lawful. We decide what it means, and we decide how to implement it in a given case. 

“So, forget all those other votes if you don’t keep the Ohio Supreme Court conservative,” French said.

That's nice.

 

French explained her remarks yesterday, saying, “The policy decisions stay with the legislators, the policy makers. . . . I’m not going to support Republican legislation; I’m not going to support Democratic legislation. It’s not my role.

Except she just said that it was her role, and the most important role  In the end, they decide.

Of course, in the end, the US Supreme Court decides.  And those positions are filled by Presidents and approved by the Senate.

So in the end, yes, who controls the Senate does absolutely matter.

The Case Against Kasich

By all accounts, Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich should be losing by double digits to Democrat Ed FitzGerald.  Kasich has refused to participate in any debates, signed one of the nation's worst abortion laws that may soon close all abortion clinics in southwest Ohio for starters, passed a restrictive voter ID laws into effect disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority voters and worked to cut back early voting, fracked the state into an environmental mess, attacked Ohio's unions, and basically ran uncontested as a Tea Party nutjob.

But somehow, he's going to win re-election.  And this may be part of the reason why.

The editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper, hosted a meeting recently with the state’s gubernatorial candidates: incumbent Republican Gov. John Kasich, Democrat Ed FitzGerald, and Green Party Candidate Anita Rios. The discussion got a little … odd. 

FitzGerald, behind in the polls, not surprisingly stayed on the offensive, and noted the Kasich approved a law that restricts what rape-crisis counselors can tell victims. “Why was it important to have a piece of legislation that literally imposed a gag rule on rape crisis counselors?” the challenger asked. 

The governor, slumped in his chair and visibly annoyed, decided to pretend that FitzGerald wasn’t in the room.

This isn't hyperbole, this is literally what happened.

One of the editors prompts him: “Would you like to answer that, governor?” 

“Do you have a question?” Kasich responds. The editor then tries to explain the question FitzGerald just asked. As much as the editor understands the question, anyway. 

“I assume that it had to do with, uh, there were limits on what they could say about having abortions,” the editor says. 

Kasich still says nothing, possibly because the reporter made the mistake of mentioning FitzGerald’s name while summarizing the question. Once more, Kasich spreads his hands and asks, “I mean, did you have a…?”   At which point FitzGerald jumps in and explains to the clueless reporter, “He’s trying to pretend he didn’t hear me say it, so you need to repeat it.”

Kasich apparently so does not care that he dismissed his opponent while in the room, while talking to the editorial board of the largest paper in the state.

The paper's response?

Keep in mind, Kasich refused to participate in any debates this year, so this editorial-board meeting was literally the only opportunity for Ohio voters to see their gubernatorial candidates talk about their ideas. It made the discussion, hosted by the Plain Dealer’s editors, arguably one of the more important political events in Ohio this campaign season. 

And initially, the newspaper did publish the video of the gathering online. But then the paper pulled the clip, posted an audio-only version, and threatened legal action against an Ohio-based news site that offered readers a YouTube version of the discussion. 

That site being our friends at Plunderbund, who apparently were the only people to realize the import of this chain of idiocy.  Kasich, by the way, still hasn't answered the question about why he signed into law a rule that literally forbids rape crisis counselors from mentioning abortion.  His answer, that he's "pro-life", makes it self-evident in Kasich's eyes.

Oh, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer endorsed Kasich despite that exchange.

So apparently, you don't need to do any debates if your Governor in Ohio anymore, and you don't have to answer questions from newspaper editorial boards either.  You get endorsed because the corporate masters at the news tell the paper to endorse the Republican and that's that.  Kasich could not give a damn about this, you're just wasting time until his corporate funded reelection is in place.

That's Ohio for you.  And four more years of red state lunacy may finally finish the state off.

Both Sides Do It, Millennial Edition

Election Day is Tuesday, and the bottom line is Millennial voters don't give a good god damn and think both sides are responsible for the terrible state of politics in America.

A new poll released Wednesday by Harvard's Institute of Politics suggests Democrats are failing miserably on that front when it comes to Millennials, the generation that helped Barack Obama make history in 2008. The survey of just over 2,000 18-29-year-olds broadly indicated a shift away from Democrats in 2014, leading the pollsters to declare Millennials "up for grabs" in the midterms.

But the most stunning finding came from the question of which party young voters wanted to see control Congress next year. Among all respondents, 50 percent chose the Democrats and 43 percent picked Republicans. But among the much smaller subset of respondents who said they would "definitely" vote this fall, the GOP won, 51 percent to 47 percent.

It gets worse.

That Millennials have become disenchanted with the current state of affairs in Washington seems obvious. Asked who they blame for the "political gridlock" in the capital, a clear majority–56 percent– replied, "All of them." Nearly the same percentage said they would recall or replace the entire Congress if they could.

Millennials, particularly younger Millennials, want real change, but they don't believe either party can provide it, so they don't vote.  The result is that the GOP-heavy Boomers will continue to control politics in this country for another decade or so.

The relentless whining that "Obama has failed us, he's worse than Bush!" coming from the Professional Left has definitely had its desired effect.

If you don't vote, nothing will ever change.  I just don't comprehend when given the people who died for the right to vote, why tens of millions of Americans throw that right away because "both parties are the same".

If Millennials turned out like they did in 2008 or 2012 for 2014, Republicans would be pissing themselves in fear.  But hey, Obama is worse than Bush, so who cares, right?

Not you, apparently.