Buckeye State Blues

Here in 2018, the Ohio/Indiana/Kentucky tri-state area is now the heart of red-state Midwest America, and if Ohio Democrats ever want to win the 88% white state of Ohio (and getting whiter) again in the future, they're going to have to follow the Sherrod Brown model, argues American Prospect's John Russo.

The Ohio results make Republican dominance clear. The Ohio GOP won 73 of 116 Statehouse races while collecting just over 50 percent of the total vote. That sounds close, but Republicans did not even field candidates in nine races. They also won 12 of Ohio’s 16 congressional districts with just over 52 percent of the overall vote. The results reflect past gerrymandering by the Kasich administration—which will only get worse as Republicans will control reapportionment in 2020.

So what’s the matter with Ohio? Conventional wisdom says that Ohio is too white, too working class (by education), and too rural to support Democrats anymore. That might seem to explain voting patterns in the midterms. Republican Mike DeWine won the largely white exurban, small town, semi-rural, and rural areas that dominate the state. Cordray won in urban and some suburban areas, mostly in the northeast, where the population includes many people of color. Unfortunately, those areas are chiefly found in just nine of Ohio’s 88 counties. Some of those blue regions, especially the traditional Democratic strongholds of Cuyahoga, Mahoning, and Trumbull Counties, no longer deliver enough votes to overcome growing Republican power elsewhere in the state.

But conflating race, class, and region misses several complicating factors. First, Ohio illustrates a point made recently by John McCullough, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: When pundits talk about the “working class,” they are usually not talking about class but about whiteness. According to a 2016 Brookings Institution report, Ohio is whiter than other rust belt states (82 percent, compared with 77.6 percent in Michigan). And while much of the state is rural, its suburban and exurban areas are growing, and their predominantly white populations include both working- and middle-class residents.

Ohio’s whiteness explains only part of the problem, though. The Democrats also created their own obstacles through inbred party leadership and poor messaging. Despite a series of defeats, the Ohio Democratic Party still relies on the same leaders, consultants, and lobbyists who failed in past elections and have not developed a bench of future candidates. Twelve years ago, the last time Democrats won Statehouse races in Ohio, the party capitalized on Republican scandals. Not this year. Further, as Alec MacGillis has written in The New York Times, the Ohio Democratic Party, unions, and some progressive organizations failed to support more progressive Democrats or to invest time or money in “areas where the party is losing ground.”

Cordray and other statewide candidates also failed to offer concrete proposals that would address the economic challenges facing both working- and middle-class voters. The only candidate who focused on such policies was also the only Democrat who won statewide: Senator Sherrod Brown. Why? Brown’s campaign embraced his small town Ohio roots and stressed his consistent support of policies—like protectionist trade rules, increasing the minimum wage, and reducing prescription drug prices—that would improve the lives of working people. This message, combined with his long-standing commitment to campaigning in every county, red or blue, ensured that his message appealed to broad range of voters across races, class affiliations, and regions.

Unfortunately, Cordray wasn’t able to follow Brown’s model. Despite Cordray’s leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which should have defined him as a progressive who would defend ordinary people from Wall Street and corporate misbehavior, he failed to directly address the economic anxieties of working people. While Cordray and Brown voiced some of the same concerns—like lowering the cost of college education or addressing the opioid crisis—Cordray waited until late in his campaign to emphasize the kind of economic policies that have long been at the core of Brown’s political identity. He also lacked Brown’s track record and his down-to-earth style.

Brown’s coattails were simply not long enough to carry other Democrats. In fact, Brown’s numbers may have been pulled down by the other statewide candidates. He won by only 6.4 percent, despite a weak Republican opponent and an 8-to-1 fundraising advantage, according to David Skolnick, political analyst for The Vindicator—the local paper in Youngstown, a Brown stronghold.

As the 2018 midterms make clear, Ohio Democrats cannot count on a strong organizing effort alone to yield victories. They also need the kind of clear message, wide-ranging outreach, and concrete proposals that Brown offered. If Democrats want to reclaim Ohio, they need to recognize that many Ohio Trump voters are also Sherrod Brown voters and vice versa.

So we're right back to the same argument that we were having in late 2016: Democrats must target white Trump voters and win them back locally, at the expense of ignoring other Democratic groups nationally.

Like it or no, the prospects of Democrats in the Buckeye state are pretty dismal.  And unlike Texas and Florida, Ohio is getting less diverse, not more diverse.  Ohio Dems may have to shift into Joe Manchin mode to survive, and it's not going to be a fun time, but the reality is that Ohio Dems right now are in even worse shape than KY Dems.

Which is why I don't think Brown has a chance in hell of any national campaign.  He might make a good Veep, but frankly, Dems can do better.

StupidiNews, Turkey Day Edition!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for you guys, and the fact that Dems may actually make it 40 seats after all.

Have a good long weekend, posting will be light.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Wipes Out The Orange

That sound you heard last night is the fork being stuck in the California GOP, effectively wiped off the map in the 2018 midterms as all 7 congressional districts in formerly red Orange County now belong to Team Blue.

California Democrats completed their sweep of the congressional delegation in Orange County on Saturday as Gil Cisneros defeated Young Kim, a Republican, to capture a fourth seat in what had once been one of the most conservative Republican bastions in the nation.

The victory by Mr. Cisneros, a philanthropist, was declared by The Associated Press. It completes what has amounted to a Democratic rout in California this year. Democrats set out to capture seven Republican-held seats where Hillary Clinton defeated President Trump in 2016, including four in Orange County. They won six of them.

Representative David Valadao, from the Central Valley, is the only Republican who survived the Democratic onslaught in those seven districts, according to The Associated Press. His margin has shrunk as mail-in votes have continued to be counted. The deadline for counting those votes in California is Dec. 7.

With Mr. Cisneros’s victory, Democrats now control all four House seats in Orange County — the birthplace of Richard M. Nixon and modern-day conservatism. The party also won supermajorities in the California Assembly and Senate, while the party’s candidate for governor — Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor — easily turned back a Republican challenge. Democrats control every statewide elected position in California.

Before this election, the 53-member California congressional delegation included 39 Democrats and 14 Republicans. Assuming Mr. Valadao keeps his lead, after this year’s midterms it will be 45 Democrats and eight Republicans.

Mr. Cisneros and Ms. Kim were competing for the seat left open after Representative Ed Royce, who has represented the area since 1993, decided not to seek re-election. Mr. Cisneros won by about 3,500 votes, receiving 50.8 percent of the votes cast.

And it's still possible that Valadao loses to Democrat TJ Cox as Valadao's lead has been cut to under 2,000 votes.  It's entirely possible that the Republican GOP delegation, a massive group compared to just about any other state at 14, will be 7 by the time January rolls around.  That would be just 13% of the state's delegation, a smaller percentage than Democrats have here in Kentucky (17%), Ohio (29%) or Indiana (22%).

If the Democrats are toast in the Rust Belt,  then the GOP is on the slab in California, and there's no real reason to think they're coming back anytime soon.  Pollster Stan Greenberg:

At first, the results looked like something of a stalemate. The Republican Party retained and even strengthened its hold on the Senate. President Trump’s approval rating was at 45 percent, one percentage point below his percentage of the popular vote in the 2016 election. Analysts said that Mr. Trump still knew how to get Republicans “excited, interested and turn them out” and that he had “deepened his hold on rural areas.”

In the days that followed, though, it became clear that Democrats had made substantial gains. Analysts I trusted concluded that this was because suburban and college-educated women issued “a sharp rebuke to President Trump” that set off a “blue wave through the urban and suburban House districts.” At first, I also believed that was the main story line.

But the 2018 election was much bigger than that. It was transformative, knocking down what we assumed were Electoral College certainties. We didn’t immediately see this transformation because we assumed that Mr. Trump and the polarization in his wake still governed as before.

First of all, Democrats did not win simply because white women with college degrees rebelled against Mr. Trump’s misogyny, sexism and disrespect for women. Nearly every category of women rebelled.

These conclusions are based on Democracy Corps’ election night survey for Women’s Voice Women’s Vote Action Fund and a study of the exit polls conducted for Edison and Catalist.

Yes, House Democrats increased their vote margin nationally among white women with at least a four-year degree by 13 points compared with the Clinton-Trump margin in 2016. But Democrats also won 71 percent of millennial women and 54 percent of unmarried white women (who split their votes two years earlier). In 2018, unmarried white women pushed up their vote margin for Democrats by 10 points. In fact, white women without a four-year degree (pollster shorthand for the white working class) raised their vote margin for Democrats by 13 points.

Overall, white women split their vote between Democrats and Republicans, but it is clear which way they are moving. Interestingly, the white college women who were supposed to be the “fuel for this Democratic wave” played a smaller role in the Democrats’ increased 2018 margin than white working class women, because the former were 15 percent of midterm voters and the latter 25 percent. 

Yes, white women made up 40% of the 2018 vote, but moving that needle from a 4-5% Trump win to an even split turned the overall election into a full 2% swing in favor of the Dems, and that turned this from 20-25 Dem seats to 40.

The other big move to Dems:  No national third party candidates stealing Dem votes among men.  In 2016, men voted 52%-41% for the GOP and nearly ten percent voted for a third party candidate.  In 2018, that went to 51%-47%.   That also made a huge difference.

Dems can win in 2020 by huge margins if voters keep dropping Trump.

Mississippi Turning

There's still one more Senate race to be decided next week, the runoff in Mississippi between Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic candidate Mike Espy, and we could very well have another Doug Jones/Roy Moore situation in the works.

A U.S. Senate runoff that was supposed to provide an easy Republican win has turned into an unexpectedly competitive contest, driving Republicans and Democrats to pour in resources and prompting a planned visit by President Trump to boost his party’s faltering candidate.

Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith stumbled recently when, in praise of a supporter, she spoke of her willingness to sit in the front row of a public hanging if he invited her — words that, in the South, evoked images of lynchings. She has struggled to grapple with the fallout, baffling members of her party and causing even faithful Republicans to consider voting for her opponent, former congressman Mike Espy.

That Espy is attempting to become the state’s first black senator since shortly after the Civil War made her remarks all the more glaring. It has positioned him to take advantage not only of a substantial black turnout but of a potential swell of crossover support from those put off by Hyde-Smith’s campaign.

Espy remains the underdog in the conservative state, but Republicans with access to private polling say Hyde-Smith’s lead has narrowed significantly in recent days. Republicans need only to look to next-door Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones pulled out a surprise win last year, to stoke concern.

For Republicans, the Nov. 27 runoff is a chance for a slight expansion of their majority in the Senate, their one bright spot in this year’s midterm elections. If Hyde-Smith wins and Gov. Rick Scott keeps his lead in the Senate race in Florida, Republicans would have a senate majority of 53 to 47. A loss in Mississippi would give the GOP a 52-to-48 majority, only one up from the current razor-thin margin.

Trump’s campaign announced Saturday that he would hold rallies for Hyde-Smith in Tupelo and Biloxi the night before the election. The Republican National Committee, meantime, has two dozen staffers in Mississippi and plans to send more. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is also sending reinforcements and last week made a $700,000 ad buy.

The GOP is in full panic mode here and will most likely lock the state down as they did with Tennessee and Sen. Marsha Blackburn cruising to a easy win.  But -- and it's a big caveat here -- Hyde-Smith was appointed earlier this year and Mike Espy is a former Congressman, there's more than a bit of name recognition on Espy's side.

Republicans will almost certainly keep this seat, but it won't be a double-digit runaway win, either. 

If you're in the Magnolia State, you can make a difference next week!

It's About Suppression, Con't

Stacey Abrams has relented in the Georgia governor's race and Brian Kemp will win, having overseen his own election to the office.  There's every reason to believe that Kemp won by disenfranchising tens, if not hundreds of thousands of black voters in the state as Ari Berman at Mother Jones reports.

Georgia was the epicenter of Republican voter suppression tactics in 2018. As secretary of state, Kemp instituted a series of suppressive policies that Abrams said allowed him to “tilt the playing field in his favor.” These efforts uniquely hurt voters of color, who formed the backbone of the Abrams base, while having a much smaller effect on white voters, who strongly supported Kemp.

Kemp began by shrinking the electorate. Under his leadership, Georgia purged 1.5 million voters from 2012 to 2016, twice as many as in the previous four years, and removed an additional 735,000 voters from the rolls over the past two years. On one evening in July 2017, Georgia purged 500,000 voters, in an act the Atlanta Journal Constitution said “may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history.” Some voters were removed legitimately, because they had died or moved, while others were purged for more controversial reasons, such as not having voted in the previous six years. More than 130,000 of those purged had registered to vote in 2008, when Barack Obama first ran for president, and nearly half were voters of color.

Registration problems were widespread in Georgia. Weeks before the election, the Associated Press reported that Kemp’s office had put 53,000 people on a pending registration list because information on their voter registration forms did not match state databases. Seventy percent were African American and 80 percent voters of color, in a state that’s 60 percent white. Though these people remained eligible to vote, the list led to widespread confusion, and there were reports on Election Day of hundreds of people on the pending registration list being forced to cast provisional ballots or leaving the polls without voting, even though they should have been given regular ballots. Three thousand naturalized US citizens—who were disproportionately Latino and Asian American—were put on the list because their citizenship status didn’t automatically update in state databases when they become citizens.

The 22,000 provisional ballots cast in 2018 far exceeded the number of provisional ballots in 2014 (12,000) and 2016 (17,000). Based on data from past elections, rough half of these ballots will be rejected, according to election officials. A federal court found that the increase in provisional ballots was “likely to have been the result of persistent problems and/or errors in the State’s voter registration system and ineffective administration of the provisional balloting scheme.”

Days before the election, Kemp falsely accused Georgia Democrats of “cyber-crimes” for uncovering vulnerabilities in the secretary of state’s website. Georgia was one of only five states that used electronic voting machines with no paper backups, and Kemp repeatedly resisted efforts to secure the state’s voting system, accusing the federal government of trying to “subvert the Constitution” when it offered to help safeguard against Russian hacking in 2016.

“The number of people who cast provisional ballots,” says Sara Henderson, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, “doesn’t even come close to the number of people who were disenfranchised.” The Abrams campaign heard from 25,000 people who had problems voting. Henderson helped oversee election protection efforts for nonpartisan voting rights groups and said “our phones in the command center were ringing off the hook.”

Long lines at the polls were another big problem. The average wait time on Election Day was three hours in metro Atlanta. One largely African American precinct outside Atlanta saw four-and-a-half-hour lines. There were no similar reports of long lines in Republican-leaning areas. It’s impossible to know how many people left without voting because of the lines. Georgia had the second-longest voting wait times of any state in 2016, and the problem only got worse in 2018.

Long lines were compounded by the fact that Georgia had closed 214 polling places since 2012. “One-third of Georgia’s counties,” reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “have fewer precincts today than they did in 2012.” More than half of the counties with closed voting locations had African American populations of 25 percent or higher. Though the decisions were made by individual counties, Kemp’s office advised them on how to close polling locations.

A series of court decisions before the election rebuked Kemp’s actions, finding that he violated laws such as the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, and Help America Vote Act. (More voting rights lawsuits have been filed against Georgia than any state except for Texas since 2011.) In five court decisions, judges instructed Georgia to count absentee ballots rejected because of mismatched signatures or missing birth dates; ordered counties to give voters more time to have their provisional ballots counted; and said that naturalized citizens should be given the opportunity to vote if they brought proof of citizenship to the polls. But it’s unclear how many of the orders filtered down to poll workers or everyday voters, who remained confused by the dizzying number of voting restrictions and last-minute court rulings.

When he was running for reelection as secretary of state in 2014, Kemp warned: “Democrats are working hard registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines. If they can do that, they can win these elections in November.” Kemp did everything in his power to make sure that didn’t happen in 2018—and that’s a big reason why he, and not Abrams, will be Georgia’s next governor.

Kemp has shown the GOP the path to victory in any state close to being purple: relentless and repeated purging of black voters and then making it as difficult as possible to vote in majority black precincts.   When it takes nearly five hours to cast a vote, that is suppression on a massive scale. It is criminal and Brian Kemp should be impeached if not in jail, but this will only get worse as the GOP grip on power in states like Georgia loosens.

You will never convince me that Brian Kemp didn't outright steal this election, and Democrats need to be ready to fight this all the way, because it will absolutely happen again.

Last Call For Low-Hanging Orange Fruit

Cook Political Report's Amy Walter ran the numbers on the Democratic party's blue wave last week and found that Trump's support may be a mile-wide in districts that he claimed in 2016, but only an inch deep as Trump didn't get 50% of the vote in a lot of districts.  These shallow districts are where the Democrats targeted their House wins, and they peeled the GOP apart like an orange.

Not long after the November 2017 elections, I had lunch with David Petts, a Democratic pollster and longtime veteran of congressional campaigns. He remarked that the Republican gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey performed within one to four points of President Trump in every congressional district in the state. The good news for the Republicans was that they didn’t lose districts that Trump easily carried. The bad news, even a GOPer not named “Trump” did not perform any better in districts Trump narrowly won or narrowly lost in 2016.

Petts handed me a spreadsheet that arranged the GOP-held congressional districts by Trump 2016 vote and argued Democrats should target every single district in which Trump took 55 percent of the vote or less. The theory being that Trump’s vote in 2016 would be the high-water mark for GOP candidates in 2018. As important to note were the significant number of districts that Trump won, but where his margin of victory masked his anemic vote share. Take New Mexico’s 2nd district. Trump won that district by 11 points, yet took just 50 percent of the vote. It was Clinton who underperformed there.

I tacked that chart onto the wall near my computer and watched it closely throughout the year. And, as Trump replayed his 2016 “all-base-all the time” strategy as president, it became clear he wasn’t going to be any more popular in the places that he lost, nor any less popular in the places that he won big. As such, the vote Trump took in a district in 2016, remained an accurate barometer for GOP vote share in 2018 in those districts.

Petts’ theory proved to be prescient. Of the 47 districts where Trump took less than 51 percent of the vote, Democrats have (so far) won 32 of them. If we exclude Utah’s four districts (in which Trump’s vote share was depressed thanks to the presence of third-party candidate and Utah native Evan McMullin), Democrats will have won at least 74 percent of the districts held by Republicans where Trump was the weakest in 2016.

Moreover, thirteen of those 32 districts were ones that Trump carried in 2016. In other words, using the number of seats held by Republicans that Trump lost (25) was the wrong metric. Vote share was the more appropriate standard.

For all the talk that open seats are what doomed Republicans, well-prepared incumbents weren’t any more resilient to the wave than GOP challengers. Only seven (non-Utah) Republicans outperformed Trump in their districts by more than five points. Five of those Republicans were incumbents; two were in open seats. Of those seven, only two of these strong over performers won: Reps. Mario Diaz Balart (FL-25) and John Katko (NY-24).

In two races that are yet to be called, but where the Democrat is favored - ME-02 (Poliquin) and NJ-03 (MacArthur) — Trump took just 51.4%. And, even the three ‘surprise’ wins for Democrats — SC-01, OK-05 and NY-11 — were in districts that Trump won with less than 54 percent.

In fact, at this point, there’s not one district that Democrats won that Trump carried by more than 54 percent of the vote.

Democrats took aim at the widespread weakness of the GOP nationwide and they won.  As as Trump only gets more unpopular as we head towards 2020, expect another tier of House Republican districts to become vulnerable in two years.

Sinema Paradiso, Or A Flake Bi-Product

The last batch of mail-in votes counted in Arizona's Senate race put Democrat Rep. Kyrsten Sinema up by almost 40,000 votes, nearly two percentage points, the AP called the race, and GOP Rep. Martha McSally has conceded.

Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has made history by becoming the first woman elected to represent Arizona in the Senate. She defeated Republican Rep. Martha McSally after several days of ballot counting.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Sinema led McSally 50 percent to 48 percent when The Associated Press called the race six days after Election Day.

Sinema’s victory also marks the first time in 30 years that a Democrat has won a Senate seat in Arizona.

The race’s results were unknown for several days due to roughly 500,000 votes, mostly from Maricopa County, that still had to be counted after Election Day.

Arizona Secretary of State Michele Regan explained in a statementthat vote tabulation can take days due to security measures and the high volume of early vote ballots dropped off at polling places on Election Day. Officials must verify someone who turned in an early ballot on Election Day did not also mistakenly vote in person at the polling place.

Sinema’s historic win could appear surprising in a state where women had early success running for statewide office. But long-serving male senators kept Senate seats elusive, until the two women faced off this year to replace retiring GOP Sen. Jeff Flake.

Don't feel bad for McSally.  She'll more than likely be joining Sinema in the Senate as Jon Kyl, who is holding John McCain's seat, is largely expected to step aside and allow GOP Gov. Doug Ducey to name her to the position.

After John McCain's passing in August, the responsibility fell to Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey to appoint an interim replacement for the beloved senator in Washington. Ducey made a safe choice in former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, who retired from office in 2013. Kyl, however, only committed to serve in the role until early January, after which Ducey will once again have to choose a replacement until Arizonans make their choice to fill the seat in a 2020 special election.

So who are the potential candidates? There was speculation over the summer that Ducey might appoint his own chief of staff to the role or even Cindy McCain -- the Arizona senator's widow. But should Sinema eek out a win after ballot counting is completed, McSally will be out of a job, having vacated her seat in Congress to campaign.

If Ducey decides to appoint McSally, that could leave both candidates serving in the Senate until at least 2020. After that, the Republican appointee will have to decide whether or not to run in the special election.

Ducey has left no indication so far about his intentions for the appointment, but McSally's name certainly isn't out of the picture.

It's only a matter of who Ducey picks, and McSally just became the frontrunner, naturally she conceded gracefully.  She knows she doesn't have to fight for a Senate seat.

Stay tuned.

Bonfire Of The GOPs

As I mentioned last week, the "something special" I was working on is done, and it was a guest appearance on Bon Tindle's new podcast, Bonfire is Burning.



You can download it here. It was good to hang out with Bon for a while discussing the Democrats' blue wave on Thursday night.  I'm grateful for the opportunity.  Hopefully we'll have more to talk about for you guys soon, and listen to her podcast, she has some really good guests and it's a lot of fun.

Down Goes Dana

California Moscow Republican Dana Rohrabacher is done, down 4% now with all the votes counted, but he's refusing to concede because that's the thing now.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who for decades represented wealthy, Republican-dominated portions of California's Orange County, lost his reelection bid to Democrat Harley Rouda Saturday night.

As votes continued to be counted following Tuesday's vote, Rouda's lead over Rohrabacher continued to grow. By Saturday night, the Democrat was leading the 15-term incumbent with 52% of the vote, compared to 48% for Rohrabacher — an advantage of about 8,500 voters, with all 395 precincts counted.
As of Saturday night, Rohrabacher had not yet officially conceded the race.

Rohrabacher first took office in 1989, campaigning off his experience working as a young speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. He cruised to victory for 14 more terms. Until recently, a Republican win in his district had been considered inevitable, given the region's long history as a conservative bastion in the deep blue state.

But much has changed in the 48th District, and for the first time, pollsters this year put down Rohrabacher's race as a toss-up. Analysts attributed the closeness of the race largely to Orange County’s shifting demographics, noting that more young and Latino voters were rallying around Democrats in what has long been considered a reliably Republican region of Southern California. At play were also Rohrabacher’s entanglements with Russia and his strident support for President Donald Trump — considered a mark against him in a district that narrowly went for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Rouda, a real estate investor who once registered as a Republican, campaigned on the promise that he would take a less divisive and partisan approach to representing the district. It was a message that proved popular with some Republicans and independents in Orange County, who didn’t see their values reflected by Trump — and by extension, Rohrabacher.

Rohrabacher had felt confident going into Election Day, he told BuzzFeed News on Sunday. But he also forecast that he could blame a loss on Democratic meddling. "We know that … unless we win by a recognized margin that the Democratic Party steals elections,” Rohrabacher told BuzzFeed News. “If you’re, if it’s under 5%, we know that this election could be stolen from us."

It's pretty clear at this point that the Trump regime narrative shaping up for the rest of the year and into January is "Look at all the elections Democrats stole from you".  The GOP wipeouts in New York, New Jersey and especially California will be blamed on imaginary perfidy.

When Trump outright refuses subpoenas from House Democrats next year, he'll say that the committee chairs and Nancy Pelosi aren't legitimately in charge, and that the White House won't cooperate until new elections are held in those states, because of course the elections in states where Republicans kept their gerrymandered House delegations like Ohio and NC are perfectly fine despite winning two-thirds of House districts with 51% of the vote.

Trump will call House Democrats "illegitimate" for the next two years in preparation for 2020.

Watch.

The Recount Account, Con't

Florida's Senate and Governor's races are both going to a state-mandated recount after the counts in Palm Beach and Broward counties narrowed the gaps to under .5% leads for Republican candidates.

The Florida secretary of state is ordering recounts in the U.S. Senate and governor races, an unprecedented review of two major races in the state that took five weeks to decide the 2000 presidential election.

Secretary Ken Detzner issued the order on Saturday after the unofficial results in both races fell within the margin that by law triggers a recount.

The unofficial results show that Republican former U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis led Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum by less than 0.5 percentage points, which will require a machine recount of ballots.

In the Senate race, Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s lead over Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson is less than 0.25 percentage points, which will require a hand recount of ballots from tabulation machines that couldn’t determine which candidate got the vote.

The issue is Broward County.  It's home to Fort Lauderdale, north of Miami-Dade County, and home to two million people.  There's a major undervote issue there, and the recount will determine if people did try to vote for these offices or just left them blank because Broward County's ballot was six pages long this year.  Palm Beach County has 1.5 million, and has a similar issue.

The changing margin is due to continued vote-counting in Broward and Palm Beach counties, two of Florida’s largest and more Democratic-leaning counties. On Thursday evening, the supervisors of elections in the two counties told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that vote counting there was mostly complete. Under Florida law, counties have to report unofficial election results to the secretary of state by Saturday at noon, but Nelson’s campaign is suing to extend that deadline. Scott’s campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee are also suing both counties for not disclosing more information about the ongoing count, and Scott called on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate Broward’s handling of ballots.

Unusually, the votes tabulated in Broward County so far exhibit a high rateof something called “undervoting,” or not voting in all the races on the ballot. Countywide, 26,060 fewer votes were cast in the U.S. Senate race than in the governor race.1 Put another way, turnout in the Senate race was 3.7 percent lower than in the gubernatorial race.
Broward County’s undervote rate is way out of line with every other county in Florida, which exhibited, at most, a 0.8-percent difference. (There is one outlier — the sparsely populated Liberty County — where votes cast in the Senate race were 1 percent higher than in the governor race, but there we’re talking about a difference of 26 votes, not more than 26,000, as is the case in Broward.)

To put in perspective what an eye-popping number of undervotes that is, more Broward County residents voted for the down-ballot constitutional offices of chief financial officer and state agriculture commissioner than U.S. Senate — an extremely high-profile election in which $181 million was spent. Generally, the higher the elected office, the less likely voters are to skip it on their ballots. Something sure does seem off in Broward County; we just don’t know what yet.

One possible reason for the discrepancy is poor ballot design. Broward County ballots listed the U.S. Senate race first, right after the ballot instructions. But that pushed the U.S. Senate race to the far bottom left of the ballot, where voters may have skimmed over it, while the governor’s race appears at the top of the ballot’s center column, immediately to the right of the instructions.

In other words, there's a very, very good chance that tens of thousands of voters missed the place on the ballot to actually vote.  On the other hand, the margin is so small that Miami-Dade and Palm Beach recounts -- which will be done by hand for Senate contest -- could save Bill Nelson and send Rick Scott packing.

I feel much less confident about Andrew Gillum's chances in the governor's race versus Pocket Racist™ Ron DeSantis, but again, we're talking about the three counties having more than six million people combined, so anything's possible.

The recount has to be done by Thursday, so we'll know soon.

Last Call For The Recount Account

Recounts in Georgia and Florida are underway as evidence piles up of massive voter suppression in both those states by Republicans in order to steal both gubernatorial races and the Florida senate race. Georgia's Brian Kemp should go to prison for this.

Republican Brian Kemp’s campaign declared victory in the race for Georgia governor on Wednesday, even as election officials continued counting thousands of absentee and provisional ballots, narrowing his lead and prompting Democrat Stacey Abrams to insist she could have the votes to force a runoff election.

As the vote-counting continued, voting rights advocates accused Kemp — who as secretary of state is Georgia’s top election officer — and local officials of disenfranchising thousands of voters on Election Day. Hundreds of complaints flooded in about hours-long lines brought on by broken equipment, a shortage of voting machines and insufficient quantities of printed provisional ballots.

On Wednesday evening, Kemp was ahead with 50.3 percent of the vote to Abrams’s 48.7 percent. Abrams and the Libertarian candidate would need to gain at least 25,000 votes more than Kemp to bring his share of the vote below 50 percent and trigger a runoff.

Today the state is counting absentee, and provisional ballots and Abrams is suing to make sure those ballots are counted.  Kemp has stepped aside as Secretary of State, something he has to do under state law.  There are a lot of ballots -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- that still need to be counted.  But it gets worse:

Another problem was the limited number of voting machines in some locations. More than 1,800 machines sat idle in storage in three of the state’s largest and most heavily Democratic counties. In Fulton County, according to figures provided by elections director Rick Barron, the ratio of machines to registered voters was lower than it had been in 2014, despite predictions that turnout was likely to break records for a midterm election.

While some voters waited in hours-long lines in Fulton County, 700 of those machines sat in stacks in a warehouse in downtown Atlanta, Barron said. The machines were sidelined because they are evidence in a lawsuit alleging the equipment had been exposed to the threat of hacking in 2016.

The federal judge in the case had ordered state and local election officials — including Kemp — and the plaintiffs to weigh the demands of upcoming elections in deciding how many machines to set aside.

Kemp dragged his feet to make sure those machines couldn't be used.  It's purposeful voter suppression of black Democratic votes, period.  The legal struggle continues in Georgia, but the odds of a recount in Florida for not one but three races seems guaranteed now by state law.

Two of the highest profile races in the country -- both in Florida -- are likely headed to a recount soon. 

Sen. Bill Nelson's re-election bid is likely headed to a hand recount given that the incumbent Democrat now trails Florida Gov. Rick Scott by 17,000 votes, within the .25% margin required for a hand recount. Nelson's campaign aides believe he will emerge victorious once all the ballots are counted. 

And on the governor's side, Democrat Andrew Gillum -- after conceding the race on Tuesday evening -- has grown more supportive of a recount of late, in part because his deficit to Republican Ron DeSantis is down to 38,000 votes, within the .5% needed for a machine recount. Campaign aides, though, remain clear eyed about the the long odds that Gillum can make up that deficit. 

Recounts, which have not officially been authorized in either race, put the outcome of two of the most closely watched races of 2018 on hold, with Democrats hoping for a miracle that could get both Gillum, a candidate who garnered considerable attention in his campaign against DeSantis, and Nelson, an incumbent who Democrats had thought would win his seat going into Tuesday night, over the finish line with a win. 

"On Tuesday night, the Gillum for Governor campaign operated with the best information available about the number of outstanding ballots left to count. Since that time, it has become clear there are many more uncounted ballots than was originally reported," Gillum's communications director Johanna Cervone said in a statement. "Mayor Gillum started his campaign for the people, and we are committed to ensuring every single vote in Florida is counted." 

At no point in the statement, though, did Gillum's campaign withdraw the concession and sources close to the mayor highlight that his outlook hasn't changed since his Tuesday night speech. It it is important to Gillum, these sources said, that his supporters know they are fighting for every vote. 

"We want every vote counted, we believe that there are still votes out there for Mayor Gillum and we want to make sure his supporters know we are fighting for every vote," one source said.

The third race is where Democrat Nikki Fried is a few hundred votes ahead of Republican Matt Caldwell for the state's Agriculture Commissioner, a powerful office in the state of Florida because it handles the state's gun licenses and enforces firearms legislation.

We'll know more in the days ahead, but Democrats could win all four of these races and need to fight for every single vote to be counted.

Stay tuned.

The Blue Wave Vs. The Red Wall

One state where the Blue wave faltered badly was North Carolina, which kept its illegal, unconstitutional partisan gerrymander through the 2018 election thanks to some help in foot-dragging from the Trump regime.  It paid off, too.  Republicans kept their 10-3 seat edge despite Democrats winning the popular vote in the state yet again.

“The blue tide did not breach the gerrymandered sea wall that exists because of the broken redistricting process we have in North Carolina,” said Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause NC. “That was what we were watching for. We were waiting to see, does anything change? Gerrymandering does provide a protective sea wall for those districts.”

Across the state, Republican candidates for Congress won 50.3 percent of the vote and Democrats won 48.4 percent of the vote, according to a News & Observer analysis of vote totals. Democrats did not have a candidate in Eastern North Carolina’s 3rd district, won by Republican incumbent Rep. Walter Jones.

But Republicans kept their 10-3 edge in the state’s House delegation.

Republican Rep. George Holding defeated Democratic challenger Linda Coleman 51.2 percent to 45.8 percent in the 2nd district, which includes suburban Wake County.

Republican Rep. Ted Budd defeated Democratic challenger Kathy Manning 51.5 percent to 45.5 percent in the 13th district, which includes part of suburban Greensboro.

And Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready 49.4 percent to 48.7 percent in the 9th district, which includes parts of suburban Charlotte. All results are unofficial until certified by the state.

A three-judge panel has twice ruled the congressional districts are unconstitutional because of excessive partisan gerrymandering, with the latest ruling coming in August. The judges, which allowed Tuesday’s elections to proceed under the maps, said no future elections could use the districts as drawn. The ruling has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

One of the authors of the maps had a different view of the results.

“The fact that the Democrats competed so heavily in the seats means that they were very confident they could win those seats,” said state Rep. David Lewis, a Harnett County Republican who helped draw the districts.

“If they are very confident they could win those seats, it proves the seats were not drawn to keep them out of the process ... Any person who has looked through their mailbox or watched TV or gone on the internet or opened a newspaper knows these seats are in fact competitive.”

Don't count on the 2020 map being any better.  Yes, Democrats shorted out the supermajority that the GOP had in the state legislature and now governor Roy Cooper can actually veto things.  The worst abuses are on the way out.  But the ruling on NC's districts is now going before the Roberts court, and the only issue is whether Chief Justice Roberts will be the fifth vote to overrule the lower court.  Considering Roberts was more than happy to gut the Voting Rights Act, I fully expect SCOTUS to block the order despite the screaming racism involved in the gerrymander in the first place.

Cooper will have a tough re-election battle ahead to keep his governor's seat in 2020 too.  Like it or not, the Red Wall is here to stay in North Carolina, and in several other states in the South and Midwest.

But one of those states where Democrats are having the same problem is Ohio, and unlike North Carolina, Ohio is only getting older and whiter.  ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis has been covering Ohio politics for a while now, and this thread on Ohio Dems in 2018 is pretty sobering.

Yes, Sherrod Brown won reelection, which shows the enduring appeal of his rumpled brand of economic populism. (Though his flawed opponent got almost 48% despite getting relatively little party/outside backing.)

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) November 8, 2018

Outside of Sherrod Brown, the Buckeye State is basically a lost cause for Dems in the Trump era.  Unless they want to permanently cede it to the GOP along with Indiana and Kentucky, Ohio Dems need to figure out how to win in a state that is tailor-made for the politics of white resentment.

I don't know if they can. The Red Wall is definitely protecting Ohio, and unlike NC, I don't see a way over, around or through it.

The Blue Wave Crested The Red Wall

The Blue Wave happened last night, guys.

Democrats won the popular vote in the House last night by about seven points, they will end up with about 35 pickups, maybe a few more.  This is 100% unalloyed good news.  There were a couple of surprise wins for the Dems like Oklahoma's 5th, South Carolina's 1st and New York's 11th that were long shots, and the Dems basically will end up splitting the 30 tossups evenly while winning all the races they were favored in.

Having Democrats in charge of House committees in January means Donald Trump will be truly investigated.  Even if Trump fires Mueller today, Democrats will finally conduct real oversight of Trump and his criminal actions, and Trump knows it.

On the governor's side, Dems picked up seven Governor's seats, unfortunately Florida wasn't one of them, and Stacey Abrams hasn't conceded in Georgia yet, but she has a major legal battle ahead against Brian Kemp's cheating.  Still, Kris Kobach went down in flames in Kansas.  The Brownback nightmare is over.   And Scott Walker lost, finally.  The upper Midwest is shifting blue again after 2016.

And that brings us to the Senate.  The good news, Dems picked up Nevada as Dean Heller lost.  Confederate racist Corey Stewart got 1.3M votes in Virginia and got crushed anyway by Tim Kaine's 1.8M plus. The bad news: Heitkamp, Donnelly, and McCaskill all lost, and Bill Nelson and Jon Tester are both behind in races that could go to recounts, and Arizona is still too close to call this morning, if Kyrsten Sinema does end up losing, it will be because of the Green party candidate, and that really pisses me off.

Still, it could have been worse. Medicaid was expanded in Nebraska, Utah, and Idaho.  That's a big win that will help hundreds of thousands. We knew the Senate was going to be long odds, and it was.   But Democrats won the House back, guys.  We won some big races and seven governor's seats back.  This is good, good news.  It's not fantastic, but winning the Senate was, well, fantasy. 

The reality is still pretty damn awesome.

Last Call For Election Projections

As of 11 PM, it looks like the Dems will take the House back by a decent margin, but the GOP will keep the Senate and pick up a couple seats total. Donnelly and Heitkamp both went down, and the pickups in Texas and Tennessee didn't happen.  Arizona and Nevada will be a long night.

In the governor's races, Kris Kobach lost in Kansas, and Dems picked up New Mexico, Michigan, and Illinois, and it'll be a long night otherwise, but Mike DeWine is going to win in Ohio and that's not a good thing.  Gillum just conceded in Florida.

I'll cover it all in the morning.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It

The whole voting thing, yes.  You should do it.

NY Times has the Dreaded Needle Of Fate™ and stuff, so get out there, you still have time, and I'll check in with you later tonight.

Make history.

StupidiNews, Election Day Edition!

It’s Election Day.

Go vote.

Last Call For Final Prognostications

On the eve of Election Day, let's check in with the final numbers for the big voting prediction sites.  First up, Larry Sabato and his Crystal Ball crew.

Our ratings changes leave 229 seats at least leaning to the Democrats and 206 at least leaning to the Republicans, so we are expecting the Democrats to pick up more than 30 seats (our precise ratings now show Democrats netting 34 seats in the House, 11 more than the 23 they need). We have long cautioned against assuming the House was a done deal for the Democrats, and we don’t think readers should be stunned if things go haywire for Democrats tomorrow night. That said, it may be just as likely — or even more likely — that we’re understating the Democrats in the House. Many of our sources on both sides seemed to think the Democratic tally would be more like +35 to 40 (or potentially even higher) when we checked in with them over the weekend.

On the Senate side, it's plus one for the GOP.

Because of the bad map Democrats faced this year, the GOP picking up seats always seemed like a possibility, even a strong possibility. Our final ratings reaffirm this potential; we have 52 Senate seats at least leaning to the Republicans, and 48 at least leaning to the Democrats. If that happened, the GOP would net a seat.

Politico likewise has the Dems retaking the House, but losing the Senate.

Democrats have pulled ahead in nearly enough races to claim a majority of the 435 seats up for grabs in the first national election of Donald Trump’s presidency, with POLITICO’s final race ratings showing 216 seats in the Democratic column — those are either solidly Democratic, likely Democratic or at least leaning Democratic.

That’s a significantly stronger position than Republicans, who have 197 seats leaning or solidly in their camp, but still just shy of the 218 needed to control the House next year. Republicans would need to win at least 21 of the 22 toss-ups — races that are currently considered too close to call — to get to 218 seats.

The Senate is a darker prospect depending on Heitkamp, Ted Cruz, and the open seat in Tennessee.

If Democrats can win one of those three races, they’ll still need to sweep the five toss-up contests on Tuesday to win back the majority. Three of the five are in states that Trump carried and where Democrats are defending seats: Florida, Indiana and Missouri.

Republicans are convinced they have the advantage in both Missouri and Indiana. Of those, the Missouri seat — currently held by Sen. Claire McCaskill — is the most endangered. But public polls in recent days have McCaskill neck-and-neck with state Attorney General Josh Hawley, who had been ahead in some other surveys in October. And Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly led his GOP challenger, former state Rep. Mike Braun, in two public polls last week.

Harry Enten gets right to the point at CNN.

House forecast: Democrats will win 226 seats (and the House majority) while Republicans will win just 209 seats. A Democratic win of 203 seats and 262 seats is within the margin of error. 

Senate forecast: Republicans will hold 52 seats (and maintain control of the Senate) next Congress while Democrats will hold just 48. Anything between Republicans holding 48 seats and 56 seats is within the margin of error.

Nate Cohn at the NY Times sees dozens of true toss-ups in the House, but the Dems would only need a few of them to take the lower chamber.

After more than 10,000 interviews, the result, in the aggregate, is that Democrats and Republicans are essentially tied in the 30 districts rated as tossups by the Cook Political Report, with Democrats leading by around half a percentage point.

Democrats need to win only a handful of these tossup districts — perhaps as few as six — to gain the net 23 seats needed to take control, which is why they’re considered favorites. But Democrats haven’t put them away. Instead, those races remain startlingly close. Each of the final 28 poll results in the tossup districts was within the margin of error, and 20 of the 28 were within two percentage points, a margin that pales in comparison with the typical measurement error in a poll.

With so many close contests, even modest late shifts among undecided voters or a slightly unexpected turnout could yield significantly different results, with very different consequences for the government and the future of the Trump presidency.

Over all, the polls comport with the growing consensus among operatives from both parties that Democrats are poised to gain around 35 seats in the House. If the Times/Siena polls were exactly right (they will not be), Democrats would gain 32 seats, assuming the two parties held the seats that were not polled.

 Charlie Cook at Cook Political Report has this breakdown:

Topline: The current House breakdown is 237 Republicans and 193 Democrats with five vacancies (three Republican and two Democratic). Democrats would need a net gain of 23 seats in November to retake the majority. President Trump's low approval ratings and Democratic voters' heightened enthusiasm are threatening Republicans' structural advantages in the House, including incumbency and favorably drawn districts. A record number of Republican open seats and a new court-ordered congressional map in Pennsylvania have further weakened the GOP's position. Republicans' ability to keep their majority now depends on their ability to define individual Democrats as unacceptable alternatives on a race-by-race basis. At the moment, Democrats are substantial favorites for House control and could pick up anywhere from 20 to 40 seats. 

The Senate is not in play for the Dems according to Cook, however.

Topline: Both parties have advantages this cycle. For Republicans, the numbers are on their side. There are 34 races, including the special election in Alabama, and Democrats must defend 25 of those seats, compared to nine for Republicans. They also benefit from a friendly map in that Democrats are defending 10 seats in states that President Trump won in 2016. By contrast, there is only one GOP seat – U.S. Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada – up in a state that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton carried. Democrats are banking on the mid-term election curse in which the party in power tends to lose seats in the Senate and/or the House in mid-term elections, as well as Trump’s unpopularity and an energized base to help keep their losses to a minimum. An early read of the cycle suggests that there might not be much change in the make up of the Senate after Election Day. At this point, the range is +/- one seat for Democrats, which would have to be considered a victory. A bad night for Democrats would be the loss of three or four seats. At this point, the one certainty is that the majority is not in play. 

Finally, Nate Silver's numbers at Five Thirty Eight.

Not much has changed in our forecast since early October: Republicans are still favorites to keep control of the Senate, with a 5 in 6 (83 percent) shot.1What’s more, as we close in on Election Day, all signs point to the House and Senate moving in opposite directions this year. (As I’ve written before, this is weird but not unprecedented.) Republicans’ odds in the House are nearly the reverse of where they stand in the Senate: The GOP has a 1 in 8 (13 percent) chance of retaining a House majority.

Republicans have a 50 percent chance of adding at least one senator to their tally. Meanwhile, Democrats have a 32 percent shot of picking up at least one seat. But there is also nearly an 18 percent chance that there will be no net change — in other words, the status quo will be preserved and the GOP will hold on to its current 51-to-49 majority.

We'll see who's right and who's not.  I'm working on a special treat for you guys later this week, and I'll let you know how it goes.

Basically Nobody Likes You, Ted

A strange piece from Politico's Tim Alberta today on Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke as voters head to the polls tomorrow to see if he can beat GOP Sen. Ted Cruz tells me two things:  One, nobody likes Ted Cruz in the state at all, period, and two, Texas Republican voters are wondering out loud now why Beto ignored them in favor of getting more non-voting Democrats to the polls.

In selling a symbolic candidacy, the Hurd roadshow was foundationally essential. But it wasn’t enough. To score the biggest upset of 2018, O’Rourke would need a brand that reinforced his rejection of status quo politics. So he created one—a campaign that rejects corporate money, that avoids negative attacks, that refuses to employ pollsters or consultants. And it worked. By offering a cause rather than a candidacy, O’Rourke convinced America that a Texas Democrat could win statewide for the first time since 1994. A staggering $70 million flooded into his campaign. Celebrities came calling on a first-name basis. LeBron James made the black-and-white “Beto” signage famous. National reporters took turns deifying the skateboarding, punk-rocking congressman. And all the while, O’Rourke was flatlining. When Quinnipiac polled the race in April, after he clinched the Democratic nomination, he registered at 44 percent; in July, the same poll pegged him at 43 percent; it was 45 percent in September; and 46 percent in late October. Whenever the race has tightened, it’s due to Cruz dropping below 50 percent. In dozens of public and private surveys this cycle, O’Rourke has never broken 47 percent.

Somewhere along the line, the rock-concert crowds and record-setting fundraising and JFK comparisons obscured a basic contradiction between Beto O’Rourke the national heartthrob and Beto O’Rourke the Texas heretic. While the coastal media’s narrative emphasized his appeals to common ground, framing him as an Obamaesque post-partisan figure, the candidate himself tacked unapologetically leftward. He endorsed Bernie Sanders’ "Medicare for all" plan. He called repeatedly for President Donald Trump’s impeachment—a position rejected by Nancy Pelosi, and nearly every other prominent Democrat in America, as futile and counterproductive. He flirted with the idea of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He took these positions, and others, with a brash fearlessness that reinforced his superstardom in the eyes of the Democratic base nationwide. But it likely stunted his growth among a more important demographic: Texans.

Over the past six months, I spoke with a host of Texas Republicans about the U.S. Senate race. Many of them dislike Cruz. Some of them privately hope he loses. And all of them are baffled by the disconnect between the superior branding of O’Rourke’s candidacy and what they see as the tactical malpractice of his campaign.

In their view, Cruz is uniquely vulnerable, having alienated Texans of all ideological stripes with his first-term antics—and especially those affluent, college-educated suburbanites repelled by Trump. The senator has long lagged 10 to 15 points behind Governor Greg Abbott at the top of the ticket; Cruz’s internal modeling has consistently demonstrated there are several hundred thousand voters committed to Abbott but not to him. This is the paradox of the Texas Senate race: Though it’s clear a significant bloc of soft Republicans and conservative-leaning independents are open to rejecting the incumbent on Tuesday, it’s equally clear the challenger has done little to move them. The Quinnipiac poll in April showed O’Rourke pulling 6 percent of Republicans; by late October that number was 3 percent. And while there are signs to suggest he will win more votes than a traditional Democrat in the metropolitan areas of Dallas and Houston and San Antonio, O’Rourke is almost certain to underperform in the rural and exurban areas of the state.

The campaign is a study in extreme contrasts: Cruz, the cartoonishly unlikeable conservative whose machine-like enterprise is run by a platoon of political gurus, versus O’Rourke, the obnoxiously likeable liberal whose garage-band effort is guided by gut instinct and raw emotion. Nothing is certain in such a volatile political climate, and there have been indications of a tightening race in the campaign’s final days. Cruz learned first-hand in 2016 that an organizational advantage doesn’t guarantee victory; O’Rourke can draw inspiration from Trump, of all people, in proving the pollsters wrong. If O’Rourke wins, he will have revealed a blueprint for animating the base and turning out new voters. But if he loses—as Texas insiders in both parties expect—the autopsies will speak of a strategically imbalanced campaign that did too much mobilizing and not enough persuading.

The conventional wisdom here is that Beto ran too far to the left in Texas, worried too much about his national profile and not enough about winning over suburban white Republicans in the state and is going to find a way to lose to arguably the worst Republican in the Senate, Ted Cruz.

The conventional wisdom is also complete hogwash, because those suburban Texas counties are exactly where record early voter turnout is happening and it's not because people love Ted Cruz.

By the end of 12 days of early voting, 529,521 Dallas County residents had cast their ballots in the midterm elections — more than twice that of the 2014 and 2010 midterms.

The total is about 40 percent of the county's 1.3 million registered voters. It was about 20,000 shy of the early-voting total in 2016, a presidential election year in which turnout is traditionally much stronger.

In 2010, Dallas County had 218,156 early votes, and in 2014 there were 215,147.

On Friday, El Paso Rep. Beto O'Rourke said the voter turnout signifies that he's on the verge of making history as the first Democrat to win a statewide office in Texas since 1994.

"If North Texas continues to turn out in the record numbers that we've seen, shattering every midterm total for as long as we've been looking at them, in some cases rivaling presidential voter turnout, then we're going to win this race," O'Rourke said. "The best thing I can do is continue to be with the people of North Texas, just as we have been for almost the last two years."

If Democrats show up at presidential year turnout levels, and rural Texas remains at midterm turnout levels, Beto wins.  This was the idea from the beginning.  Texas isn't a red state, no matter what the GOP wants to believe.  It's a non-voting state.  Texas's turnout percentage is dead last in the country, and it's the second most populous state.  Only 28.4% of Texas voters showed up in 2014.  If we're already seeing that being eclipsed just by early voting, then Beto can win.

Watch.

Texas, get out there and vote.  I know I have Texas readers.  Make that difference.

Last Call For A Peach Of A Liar

This morning I noted that on Friday, a federal court ordered that Georgia GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp's scheme to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters was illegal and that Georgia had to allow people to vote even if their signatures weren't an "exact match" on their voter registration forms.  

Kemp was using his office's powers to systematically void the voter registrations of registered black Democrats as Kemp is running against Democratic state Rep. Stacey Abrams for governor.

But now Kemp is trying one last dirty trick, blaming Democrats for an attempted hack over the weekend into the state's voter registration system.

Georgia's Secretary of State's office says it has launched an investigation into a "failed attempt to hack the state's voter registration system" on Saturday evening. 

The office of Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican candidate for governor, said in a Sunday morning news release that they will investigate the Georgia Democratic Party as part of its probe, but did not offer any details on why it is investigating the Democratic party. 

"While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes," said press secretary Candice Broce in the release. "We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure." 

The Georgia Democratic Party said in a statement Sunday that the "scurrilous claims are 100 percent false" and called the investigation "another example of abuse of power" by Kemp. 

"This political stunt from Kemp just days before the election is yet another example of why he cannot be trusted and should not be overseeing an election in which he is also a candidate for governor," the state party's executive director, Rebecca DeHart, said in a statement. 

Stacey Abrams, Georgia's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, told CNN's Jake Tapper that the investigation was an attempt to distract voters two days before the election. 

"I've heard nothing about it, and my reaction would be that this is a desperate attempt on the part of my opponent to distract people from the fact that two different federal judges found him derelict in his duties and have forced him to accept absentee ballots to be counted and those who are being held captive by the exact match system to be allowed to vote," Abrams said. 

"He is desperate to turn the conversation away from his failures, from his refusal to honor his commitments and from the fact that he's part of a nationwide system of voter suppression that will not work in this election because we're going to outwork him, we're going to out vote him and we're going to win," she said. 

I'm glad that Abrams and the Georgia Democratic Party jumped on Kemp's ridiculous story.  Singling out the Democrats for this, when China, Russia, and other foreign groups have been attacking voter systems in 2016 and 2018, is the height of abuse of power.

I cannot wait for Kemp to lose, but frankly unless Abrams wins by ten points, I fully expect Kemp to illegally disqualify thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Democratic voters on Tuesday.  We may not know who is governor of Georgia for months.

But in all honesty if we saw a candidate in another country who was currently in charge of counting the ballots for his own election to higher office, and then that candidate announces 48 hours before the election that the opposition party is now under investigation for hacking the voter registration system, we'd call it a banana republic and demand UN election observers.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Trump continues to play the "scary other people" card because it works, and while I expect Democrats will continue to win the women vote overall, white women will continue to vote Republican because what they want most is Daddy Trump protecting them.

Standing in an airplane hangar in the mid-autumn chill awaiting the arrival of President Trump, Joan Philpott said she was angry and scared. Only Mr. Trump, she said, can solve the problems she worries most about.

“He wants to protect this country, and he wants to keep it safe, and he wants to keep it free of invaders and the caravan and everything else that’s going on,” said Ms. Philpott, 69, a retired respiratory therapist.

Ms. Philpott was one of thousands of women who braved a drizzle for hours to have the chance to cheer Mr. Trump at a rally here on Thursday. While political strategists and public opinion experts agree that Mr. Trump’s greatest electoral weakness is among female voters, here in Columbia and places like it, the president enjoys a herolike status among women who say he is fighting to preserve a way of life threatened by an increasingly liberal Democratic Party.

“He understands why we’re angry,” Ms. Philpott said, “and he wants to fix it.”

As Republican candidates battle to keep their congressional majorities in the midterm elections on Tuesday, Mr. Trump is crisscrossing the country to deliver a closing argument meant to acknowledge — and in many cases stoke — women’s anxieties. At rally after rally, he has said that women “want security,” warning of encroaching immigrants, rising crime and a looming economic downturn if Democrats gain power.

Some of Mr. Trump’s female backers initially supported him only reluctantly or do so now in spite of reservations about his bawdy language and erratic behavior. But they shared in his victory after the bitter and partisan battle over the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. And many believe the president when he reminds them during each of his hourlong pep rallies that the world they know — largely Christian, conservative and white — is at stake on Tuesday.

“Honestly, I’m nervous about it,” Amy Kremer, a Tea Party activist and the co-founder of the Women for Trump PAC, said of the election, which is widely viewed as a referendum on Mr. Trump. “I’ve never seen this energy and momentum for a midterm, but also the polls weren’t correct in 2016.”

Ms. Kremer said she and the other women in her Atlanta-area social circle “love” Mr. Trump, adding, “We like when somebody promises to do something and they follow through on it.”

But that warmth toward the president is decidedly a minority view among women around the country, and Republican officials fret privately that Mr. Trump’s harder-edged messages will alienate the women the party needs to preserve vital seats.

There are two theories, one, enough white women will vote for the Republicans in order for the GOP to keep the House and make Senate gains, or two, enough non-white voters will show up to counteract this group and the Democrats take back the House and maybe, just maybe, the Senate.

But let's not pretend we don't know what Trump is selling here when he says that women want "security" to a group of white, Christian women in a state like Montana that's 90% white.  White women put Trump in the White House, and he's counting on them to keep the GOP in total power on Tuesday.  "Only I can keep you safe" is what abusers and fascists tell people.

It's the last play he's got, and in a midterm electorate that will most likely be 40% white women, it's the most effective play Trump has.