Where does the suicide caucus live and what is it doing to the GOP’s prospects in the Electoral College?
According to Tom Holbrooke, the Democrats basically have a lock on 227 of the 270 votes that are needed to win the presidency. This is less optimistic than the measure of states that have gone Democratic in either five or six of the last six presidential elections. That total is 257, which is about as close to a lock as you can get without having one. Surveying the landscape, about the only piece of good news for the Republicans is that they are trending well in Minnesota and could soon make it a true battleground state. Meanwhile, the Democrats are creeping up in Arizona and Georgia.
Here’s Ryan Lizza on the makeup of the suicide caucus:
As with [Rep. Mark] Meadows [R-NC], the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.
In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.
In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).
Remember when RNC Chairman Reince Priebus came up with a plan to make the GOP more attractive to a national audience?
How’s that working out?
is boring. Dems haven’t a damned leg to stand on.
All the problems are systemic, and you continue to treat them as partisan, rather than the vast Gordian knot they are:
Energy, overpopulation, econ growth, environmental catastrophe.
Therefore, no matter how acute you think your analyses are, they are totally fucking boring and wrong, because they never address the key structures of politics.
fwiw, driftglass is even worse, to my mind.
If it’s so fucking boring, then you shouldn’t be reading this blog. It’s not about systems theory or sociology, it’s about politics.
You need to get out more, there are various different ways of looking at phenomena.
Except that in a democracy everybody really ought to be interested in politics, because it’s not just analytical, it’s how things actually get done, with us, the readers, as committed participants in our own social drama. We try to actually deal with issues like energy, overpopulation, econ growth, environmental catastrophe.
It seems you are a Platonist, above it all, looking down, while we poor schmucks remain transfixed by the shadows on the walls of the cave. In the words of our very own Arthur Gilroy, we need to wake the fuck up.
You suppose we never think about things like energy, overpopulation, econ growth, environmental catastrophe. Actually we do, but for us analyzing the Gordian knot is not enough, we’re trying to untie it.
So, really, do yourself a favor, don’t read this blog.
Compound Fuckwit is a Saint Glenneth Greenwald worshiper whose only role is to remind you and everyone else that you’re not as pure as he and his idol Saint Glenneth Greenwald are.
Period.
OK, what is your answer? You state that Boo is wrong. You do not state your thought as to what is right.
The Tea Party is well and truly fucked.
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/324965-house-gop-doesnt-have-votes-to-move-debt-ceiling
-plan
It may never even come to Boner having to ask Pelosi for votes.
I’m not sue what now what happens to the Democratic “leverage” we’ve been talking about. What about the sequester? I’m too tired to think about it.
Sorry, I read it wrong. Actually everything in the House is going as predicted. I told you I was tired.
It’s like the the old Bantustan policy in Apartheid South Africa. Dems in the USA, like blacks in South Africa may be in the majority, but Republicans (=whites in SA) can still retain power if they can bottle up sufficient numbers of Dems in crazily Gerrymndered districts (or Bantustans) where their votes count for relatively little. All that’s missing is apartheid style pass laws to make it illegal for Dems to move out of their Gerrymandered districts to “pollute” the racial purity of Republican Districts. Like South African whites, Republicans have developed their own crazy theologies to justify their supremacist rantings.
In the end a number of factors combined to destroy Apartheid:
Expect the fall of Republicanism to be dramatic and spectacular when it comes…
While I can appreciate the analogy, and while each country has a history that stands as one of the starkest examples of institutionalized racism in recent centuries, to say that “all that’s missing is apartheid style pass laws” seems an overstatement. (And I say that in full awareness of the historic and ongoing segregation of US housing markets.)
Ryan Lizza, font of conventional wisdom and Both Sides Do It mush, is now calling more than 1/3rd of the House GOP the “suicide-caucus members.”
Well, the scales have come off Master Lizza’s eyes. May other reporters experience Ryan’s epiphany. OTOH, it’s very possible that Lizza will write an Obama-blaming story next week.
The MN governor is very popular here, and he’s up for election in 2014. Add to that increasing diversity due to refugee resettlement and a more diverse younger generation, I don’t see how MN is going to “trend gop” by any real measure in the future. The opposite is happening on the ground, where years of GOP control at the state has finally been broken.