Everyone knows, or should know, that the electorate that turns out in federal midterm elections is distinct enough from the electorate that turns out in presidential elections that it is hard to draw lessons from one that reliably apply to the other. It’s treacherous enough to try to apply lessons from the last presidential election to the next one.
So, it’s important to remember that just because Scott Walker won reelection in Wisconsin, for example, this does not necessarily mean that Wisconsin in going to be in play for the Republicans in the 2016 election. It should be remembered that the last time Wisconsin voters opted for a Republican presidential candidate was in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, a campaign that carried every state but Minnesota.
On the other hand, the 2000 (48%-48%) and 2004 (50%-49%) results in Wisconsin were very close. It’s one of the reliably blue states that could conceivably flip in a competitive election. That’s why I am not comfortable putting Wisconsin behind a Blue Wall, as moderate conservative columnist Chris Ladd did in his post-midterm analysis.
For Mr. Ladd, the midterms were mostly bad news for Republicans, mainly because they did nothing to improve the party’s prospects in the Electoral College:
Few things are as dangerous to a long term strategy as a short-term victory. Republicans this week scored the kind of win that sets one up for spectacular, catastrophic failure and no one is talking about it.
What emerges from the numbers is the continuation of a trend that has been in place for almost two decades. Once again, Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level across the most heavily populated sections of the country while intensifying their hold on a declining electoral bloc of aging, white, rural voters. The 2014 election not only continued that doomed pattern, it doubled down on it. As a result, it became apparent from the numbers last week that no Republican candidate has a credible shot at the White House in 2016, and the chance of the GOP holding the Senate for longer than two years is precisely zero.
The basis for this argument is that the Democrats have locked down 257 Electoral College votes. And Mr. Ladd takes a perhaps counterintuitively dim view of the midterm results in Virginia where he sees the Republicans losing the Senate seat even in the most optimal circumstances for winning it, proving to him that Virginia should now also be included behind the Blue Wall. If you include Virginia, the Democrats have locked down the 270 Electoral Votes needed to win the presidency before the candidates have raised the first dime for their campaigns.
I have made similar arguments in the past, but I think we ought to go ahead and hold presidential elections anyway because things do not remain as static as Mr. Ladd would like us to believe. It is not easy for a party to win three straight presidential elections. Since Eisenhower defeated Truman Adlai Stevenson, it has happened only once (1980-1984-1988) and it ended in grief for George Herbert Walker Bush, who was trounced in his reelection bid in 1992. Since that 1988 election, the GOP has won the popular vote only once, in 2004, and it won the presidency that year with no margin to spare. Had they lost either Ohio or Florida, Democrat John Kerry would have been elected president despite losing the popular vote.
Parties change, circumstances change, demographics change, and people get tired of the same old thing and look to make changes. The Blue Wall is not as impenetrable as it may seem.
Our politics still have the potential to surprise us. Who predicted that the Republicans would win the governor’s race in Maryland or that Mark Warner would struggle to win reelection in Virginia.
Still, there can be no doubt that in any election with anything near normal presidential-level turnout, the Republicans are behind the eight-ball. Unless a strong third-party or independent candidate emerges to upset the apple cart, the Democrats really do have an Electoral College advantage. It’s just not as rock-solid as Mr. Ladd thinks it is.
Until the dope-drones-domestic surveillance-driven youth vote swings to Rand Paul, and puts a Republican in the White House!
[Add your own <P> tags and gifs here.]
Didn’t Ike defeat Stevenson in ’52, not Truman?
Right, Eisenhower defeated Stevenson in ’52 AND ’56. Truman didn’t even run in ’52.
It seems to me that if you want to make any projections about the 2016 election, you need to get there by way of the 114th Congress. Like, how would an impeachment affect either party’s chances in Wisconsin? How would a prolonged government shutdown play in Virginia? The next two years are going to be pretty chaotic, so we should expect the country to be in a different place by the next election. The tricky part is to figure out where that’s going to be.
Because there is somewhat of a firewall for the Democrats, Republicans in some blue states are planning to alter the way their electoral votes are assigned. I expect to see this “rigging of the system” crop up in presidential blue states like Wisconsin and Ohio. There already is legislation proposed in Michigan.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2014/11/17/bill-change-awarding-michigan-electoral-college-
votes/19168765/
Was just going to post on this.
Yeah, I thought about mentioning that. I opted for brevity.
Yeah, they backed off from that because Republicans in gerrymandered seats didn’t want the Democratic party being forced to come after them. But, if the Republicans are really looking at only a negligible chance of winning the White House as things stand, I think the Republicans will muscle it through. It would certainly work – if all the blue states with complete Republican control of their states had done, Romney would be President now.
I look forward to hearing them explain that they need to do this to protect the integrity of the system.
Ten percent or less of the “mushy middle” is all they have to sell it. And that constituency is most favorable to appeals for fairness in and improving the integrity of the system.
And easy sell compared to Cory Gardner that supported a “personhood amendment” and no increase in the minimum wage. Both of which were rejected by mid-term voters as they elected Gardner.
They’re not going to do it until they’re forced to. I don’t believe they think it’s worth doing for 2016. For one, they’re entrapped in a fever swamp of their own creation, believing that what they want to do is still popular. Can’t blame them too harshly for this. After all they have been richly rewarded despite having an extremely unpopular agenda, in part because of the media, and secondly because most people simply don’t believe they’re serious or their policies are their actual policies.
So I think they think they have a reasonable shot without messing with the rules. In truth, depending on their nominee, they might be right about that if the Democrats continue on with their coronation and nominate HRC.
I see this getting pushed in OH in Jan-Feb, 2015.
After George Bush’s presidency, I do not understand why anyone anymore regards the “unpopularity” of a policy as any bar to its enactment by a ruling majority. Why do you continue to say this? When you are in power, you do what you want. In OH, the R side controls the governorship and both houses. THAT is evidence, powerful evidence, that their policies are popular.
regards the “unpopularity” of a policy as any bar to its enactment by a ruling majority
I don’t.
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/electors.html#restrictions
I could more easily imagine stealth efforts to change state laws about how the electors should vote than a successful overt effort to divide up the electors (assuming there would continue to be push-back on that). Yeah, it should be a hard sell, but one could imagine them trying to put a “conscience” clause in place or something, and throwing out rules against bribery, and …
:-/
Eternal vigilance.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Electoral College map could get much better and more predictable for the GOP in 2016 if certain “swing” states with GOP governors and legislatures ditch the EC winner take all.
Why chance getting no EV votes out of FL, MI, NV, OH, and WI when approximately half can be had? (Gov Corbett screwed up when he had the chance.) Iowa is only two state Senate seats away from that condition. (Maybe those two could be enticed to switch.) In “blue” Virginia, the only impediment is the DEM governor.
To keep the movement going, expect to see a lot of Koch/etc. money flowing into “blue” states that are close to a leg. flip to GOP. For example, three state house seats and the governor is all that is needed in Washington.
Sorry if I’m bursting any bubbles here, but if you actually go back and LOOK at the 1992 results … without Ross Perot, Bush Pere probably wins.
Take Missouri. 44%Clinton 33%Bush 21%Perot. I believe (having grown up there, having family there, being closely associated with Dems there) that nearly ALL of the Perot voters would have voted for Bush.
This is, of course, an assumption on my part. But look at the map
Move Mo, Oh, Ga, Ky, Montana, MI, NV, IA, WI. The results are scary. In ALL of these states the margin for Clinton was less than one-half (in all except MO, less than one-third) of the vote garnered by Perot.
You may believe the Perot voters would have gone for Bush, but all the polling, both before and after the election, showed they would have split evenly. This is borne out by the fact that Clinton got a Democratic House and Senate, where Perot wasn’t running.
Which makes sense, because Perot is a weird amalgamation of positions all over the (presently) cemented ideological spectrum. Calls for deficit reduction through cutting spending, but calls for significantly higher taxes on the rich. Support gun control, opposes legalization of drugs and is hard on crime. Opposed NAFTA and general globalization, but supports deregulation of certain industries. Opposes affirmative action, supports the rights of gays. Supported welfare reform, supported higher pay for teachers. Raise the gas tax, made a lot of money off oil. Supported Vietnam, opposed Desert Storm.
Hmm, fits in with many Democrats…sigh.
You are right. However, I think the RW voters of the Perot faction would have been more likely to actually vote.
Also remember, Clinton was prior to the massive gerrymandering of the current R’s. If this gerrymandering had been in place in ’92, he might not have had a Dem Congress either.
Quite possibly not. But the Dems did win in the popular vote for the House, 50.1% to 45.1%. Under something like the current gerrymander, that would probably produce a very slim republican majority in the House – but Clinton would still have won the Presidency.
Gary Brechner’s the War Nerd: Why Sherman was Right to Burn Atlanta response to the NYTimes op-ed is first rate (even for those like that refuse to read the NYT op-ed). This:
The quotes from General Sherman’s writings are awesome. He kept trying to make the idiots act like grown-ups.
NBBooks dKos diary, Southern Delusions and the Burning of Atlanta a follow-up to Brechner’s piece is very good.
Sounds interesting. A while back I was reading some of Sherman’s letters from the start of the war, and those are fascinating. After bouncing around for a number of years, he’s finally got a position that he likes as the head of the state military academy in Louisiana.
Oops.
There’s not a chance in hell that he’s going to fight for the rebels, so now he has to give up his position and get out of Louisiana. Hell, he liked it there, and he didn’t even care about slavery!
And then at the same time that the secession crisis is going on, he’s trying to get his house in Louisiana ready for his family to come and join him.
You get a very strong sense that he took this all quite personally.
Thanks. The article is interesting. The comments are amazing – a whole bunch of unreconstructed southern losers.
It was top-notch. I FB’d it to my friends, a number of whom are still in the South and likely Republicans.
I’m a northerner living in Atlanta.
I f-ing love Sherman. Awesome General, awesome man.
I always make sure to point out that Sherman was the greatest American General in history to people here in Atlanta, whenever the opportunity arises.
Bringing up Sherman to (certain) southerners is akin to rubbing a puppy’s nose in its own mess. Which is exactly what Sherman did.
You are simply living in Dreamland. WI, MI, PA – these went R in 2010. WI, MI – they have retained R govs, R legislatures. And you don’t think this will have an impact on the presidential vote? In WI, Walker has won 3 fucking times. 3 TIMES. With full throated opposition, and he has beat them 3 TIMES.
I also STRONGLY suggest that you watch IL. IL is supposedly a blue sapphire. Well, my read is that it is in play. Why? Because the pension crisis is a full load of crap. Rauner, the billionaire who won the gov, is already on the warpath, declaring (correctly) that the state is a disaster economically. And the pension “reform” (which did not do shit to reform the FUNDAMENTAL problems in the system) has just be ruled unconstitutional.
If the legislature returns the pension obligations to the school boards, they will have to raise property taxes, which are already ridiculously high. We lived in Belleville, IL. We sold our house for 245K. We were paying 7.5K per year in property taxes. My mom sold her historic house in Arlington Heights, a chicago suburb, for 420K. She was paying 15K/year in property tax, and that was with a senior citizen discount. These figures are huge, but if the pension crisis continues, and the obligation is returned to the local school boards, you will see a doubling in property tax. That will lead to a FULL THROATED HUE AND CRY about government and school unions and the pensions they pay their workers. In addition, in IL, there are scummy tricks that pieces of REEKING SHIT like Richard J TURD Daley used to double his pension – he “worked” for the state in some make-work position in the last year of his mayorality, and this allowed him to go from 95K pension (already outrageous) to 195K. And this is the fucking piece of shit that sold the parking system of the City of Chicago to some Spanish firm for about 1% of the long term value. Parking in Chicago is insanely expensive and is destroying the quality of life there.
The graveyard you’re whistling past is R in off-years, and D in presidential years.
But hey, keep whistling.
And of course that is why Walker was recalled in 2012, a D year.
You are the one whistling past the graveyard. We are sitting here watching a shift in rural perceptions. The D brand is simply unsaleable PERIOD in rural counties, and these are 80% of the country. These are the ones which PA, MI, OH, WI, and many other states have used to redistrict making it for now IMPOSSIBLE for the D party to capture a majority of districts.
In IL, IL-12 (a D stronghold since ever) went R. IL is now just like all the other states – totally dependent on Chicago and the collar counties to stay blue. The pension crisis will end that. Because when property taxes go up, up, up, D candidates go out, out, out.
IL-12 has a PVI of +0 to both sides, suggesting it’s toss-up.
That may be. However, when a district flips like it did, that’s a moment to watch. Bill Foster in IL-08 (I think) won in 2008, lost 2 years later, and won this year. His district is south suburban. Just because you lose the district for a year, is not forever I realize.
But IL-12 is basically East St Louis and 6 more black towns and a whole lot of rural turf. This is going to be hard to win back.
The recall election was held in June of 2012. I can’t really say any date other than election day in a Presidential election favors Democrats in statewide voting in Wisconsin.
What do you want to see done with the pension crisis? Should the IL legislature reach a deal with Rauner?
What should be done? I think the unions had better read the tea leaves and convert contracts from defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution 401K matching contribution plans. That way, the pension crisis can be capped at current obligations. Some kind of long-term bonds could be written to cover the current obligations, and no new ones would be incurred.
If unions do not get realistic, they are gonna lose everything.
And I didn’t mention OH, which has been the key state in the last 20 years for the presidency. It is now controlled by the R party, and the chumps put up by the D Party were totally unfit for the local school board, much less for statewide office. Maybe you don’re remember, but Kasich was the Paul Ryan of the Gingrich Congress. He was there at the invention of modern aggressive conservatism. And you are going to see some stuff you will not like in OH this year. When the Sec of State (Hunstead) is a culture warrior, bad stuff will happen during elections, like ensuring that the R precincts have 2x voting machines for D precincts.
I know that a high home property taxes are your big beef, but that’s one of the results of screwing up rational progressive income, luxury, excise, import, inheritance, and business taxes. As everybody pays property taxes on their residence, regardless if they own or rent, you’re not being singled out. What those lower income taxes and lower mortgage rates have done is increased the value of houses, and good white folks are only too pleased to see their housing wealth increased and make it more difficult for those with lower incomes to be able to participate in that form of wealth accumulation.
Not going to defend any mismanagement of pension obligations in your area but the private sector has been no better managed.
No, they are not my big beef, since I moved out of IL. But my point is that high property taxes are going to go higher, and they will push IL from a reliable blue state to a far less reliable state. They will enable Republicans like Rauner to use WI tactics of envy and anti-govt-unionism to push more suburban home owners to the R column. Because the property taxes are real money.
You are confused about 1 point. High “house wealth” is a bullshit idea. This is a true confusion on a lot of people’s part. House “value” is bullshit because it’s only value when you sell the house. In the meantime, for the 20-30 years that you might live in that house, you are paying these ginormous property taxes under the speculative fiction idea that you will get more money at the end. And all home owners realize this. House value is bullshit, honestly.
I’m not confused. Just explaining the bargain that voting homeowners accepted over several decades. Who actually personally profits in the long-term depends on many factors, but generally over the decades it skewed towards middle income and above white people. Only now do the younger middle income people figure out that they’ve been screwed by high income/wealth people and going forward it’s less available (or affordable) to middle income people.
IMHO the whole homeownership fetish was bad public policy. Creating ecologically unsustainable housing patterns subsidized by the federal government. There’s a reason why the housing bubble didn’t infect Germany as much as it did other EU countries — they have a much better mix of housing options.
Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent. Here’s why
Good article — did a substantial amount of research and wrote a diary on this a few years ago.
Fewer single-family homes, lower occupant’s ownership (<50%), makes housing more stable and affordable for everybody. Doesn’t intuitively connect for USians because we were born and bred in an environment that equates home ownership with both wealth accumulation and stability.
2012 NYTimes article — “Penn South and Pruitt-Igoe, Starkly Different Housing Tales.” Basically housing like Penn South was facilitated by the German government — some publicly owned and some privately owned but all to maximize the value to renters. Pruitt-Igoe was a poorly designed, poorly built, and cheaply built new housing that turned into a slum the day it opened.
“I also STRONGLY suggest that you watch IL.” I am watching my home state where I live and I have been having similar thoughts. One Illinois U.S. Congressional district (12th) went Republican for the first time since the end of WWII. Yikes! Also, Chicago, which keeps the state from being an Indiana or Missouri, is losing population.
http://robparal.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-is-chicago-losing-population.html
Tax issues convert persons from D to R due to simple economics. If the pension crisis is not solved soon, and there are additional strikes by the idiots in the Chicago school system, I predict that IL will surprise a lot of people. I lived in IL-12 for 12 years (1997-2009). We had Jerry Costello all the time I was there – a relic of the past (conservative catholic Dem who voted pro-life but was otherwise a D). He retired in 2012 I think. The Ds tried to save the seat, but the guy they got in was just a standard machine politician. The district has a lot of black-white issues, as it is ESL/Washington Park vs farmers. Belleville and similar suburbs are going more and more R. I don’t think IL-12 will come back to the D party for a while.
So the workers get the blame since the politicians were playing legislative games? So you’ll get behind a UBI?
Time to move out of the cloud and live in the actual real world. Over the last 40 years, the system was underfunded, time and again. This has led to the current situation.
However, that was then, this is now. The issues in the past are done. The problem which IL politicians must address is
I have no idea what a UBI is.
So the workers for the state are going to be like private workers and watch their 401(k) funds be nibbled to death by management fees or borrowed during periods of unemployment (with a tax penalty to boot).
The betrayal of trust by management of all institutions is huge.
There are 2 choices.
It’s gonna happen, and your highly prejudicial and slanted view notwithstanding, it’s very difficult to see anything happening in the next 10 years but this.
Mark my words, by 2020, there will be no contracts with teacher’s unions, government unions, or police/fire unions with pension guarantees. None.
And then you wonder why Quinn list to Rauner? I saw your post earlier upthread. People pay those kind of property taxes already in suburban Philly. No one I know is moving out because of them. Why? Because the schools are pretty good. Except now we’ll have to face the dicking around that Corbett and the GOP controlled legislature gave us. Why don’t you blame the politicians and the elites, who are the cause of this problem, instead of the workers?
California has had a big pension crisis. We raised taxes some and cut government programs some. Life goes on. And in our case it was less defensible because most of it was due to a big statutory pension increase in 1999.
Theft is still theft.
The problem is that pensions for public workers are easily demonized in conjunction with their fiscal status in a number of states. Private sectors workers know their retirement plans are often terrible but many see no reason why they should be helping pay for pensions that they themselves do not get. In a sane world workers would be agitating for better retirement security.
There is no Blue Wall. And there is a Red Wall only because Democratic national strategy has made it so. And indications so far is that Democrats will likely do so again in 2016.
There is enough dissatisfaction in both parties that we are approaching some sort of political realignment. It looks like Hillary Clinton is staking out the position that globalist, corporatist, national security state is the direction for the first female President to take. How Maggie Thatcher of her. And how so disappointing to the ladies of my mother’s generation who hoped that a woman President would bring an end to war; well, most of those ladies have passed and do not have to witness that bitter result of the glass ceiling. How it acculturates ambitious women.
It is not clear what that realignment will look like because events of the next two years will play very heavily into it. And once we are past it, we will say that the Obama Presidency was indeed a transformational period, just not the one we had envisioned in 2008.
And it’s not clear whether it will be totally contained within the two-party umbrellas.
Nothing at all is set in amber at this moment.
Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted on domestic issues.
And she sure in hell can’t be trusted on foreign policy.
So, once again, I ask…
is this truly the best the Democratic Party can do?
Barack Obama is Hillary Clinton, an hour late. He will be Hillary’s best friend in 2016, if she wants that, because he needs her to secure his legacy.
Barack Obama is not Hillary Clinton, and he doesn’t need her for anything.
I guess we’ll have to disagree on that. I don’t see much of a difference between them on policy. Hillary is, however, the best shot at preventing Republicans from gutting Obamacare and doing further damage to the social safety net. Republicans winning the Presidency and retaining control of Congress in 2016 would certainly affect Obama’s legacy.
is following economic stagnation. The inability to generate enough decent jobs is THE fundamental problem.
I do not believe the Democrats can win in 2016 unless the recovery begins to be felt below the top 10%. In addition, the statistical probability of a recession between now and 2016 is reasonably high. We are now 5 years into the expansion (the recession ended as defined by economists in Q2 of 2009). We have NEVER had 7 years of straight expansion.
Now the recovery sucks, and so you may argue that those numbers don’t apply, but in the end I think the Democrats are underdogs heading into 2016 because of the economy.
Bleah. Ladd’s “analysis” is IMO a repub ratfuck attempt. It will be eaten up by the beltway dems as justifying their plans: no need to offer good candidates or good policies, the election will win itself for us.
ANY comment about “EV inevitability” of the D Party is just complaicent stupidity. The D Party is losing, and the partisans who are using the “demographics is destiny” argument are seriously confused.
D party is losing the youth vote. The D party does not promote jobs for millenials. They promote jobs for foreign workers not US citizens. The D party does not have any policies about college debt. Why should a millenial vote for the D party.
The D party promotes illegals over domestic workers. There are a lot of jobs that Americans want to do. Obama’s policy is going to unleash the floodgates of illegals getting better jobs. Good for illegals, seriously bad for lower class workers.
Women voters? For the moment, D party has them. But abortion politics and rape politics have limits. We’ll see what happens with these issues.
D party has a huge problem in 2016.
I think you’re reading way too much into it. I think it’s exactly what it purports to be – a less-insane Republican trying to talk the total nutcases into avoiding the really crazy stuff and trying to convince the other less-insane Republicans they have to expand their coalition somewhat if they want to win in 2016.
I don’t think so.
The analysis offered is pretty clear to what Booman has been saying for awhile now. And the evidence is pretty solid: 52% of 36% of the electorate doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.
If people want to claim that the House is lost to Democrats for awhile, I won’t argue, because that is where gerrymandering is going to show up writ large.
But the Senate 2016 forecasts is pretty solid. And while I don’t think a Democrat Tomato Can beats any Republican, the Republican clown car is about to be kickstarted real soon. Let’s hope Bachmann, Gohmert, Santorum and Perry all show up.
What I enjoyed was reading a conservative who actually acknowledges observable reality.
I think that it’s going to take court action to break gerrymandering. When there is enough integrity on the conservative side of the court to respect the Constitution again. Or the pressure will be movemental from the streets after an egregious discrepancy between the popular vote and the composition of Congress.
The alternative is for some non-Republican party to win those gerrymandered district seats in the legislature and redraw them midterm. Texas set the precedent for that. And having an independent commission charged to draw the to rational and fair expectations for any party makes the most sense. That will make them more swingy, exactly what the political establishment does not want.
The SC has stated, clearly and repeatedly, that gerrymandering for political purposes is constitutional, but for other reasons (racial etc) it is not.
Thus, I see no reason to believe that the court will produce a ruling which contradicts 200 years of policy and rulings. None.
Until Democrats get serious about the question “Why do we not appeal to anyone in a rural turf?” and find policy answers to this question, we will see MI, WI, OH, PA, NJ, and IL further and further away from competitive. And we will see a state, OH, MI, or PA, which goes the “EV to congressional district” route. That is specifically and totally constitutional.
How are D partisans going to stop them? In OH, they cannot. In MI, they cannot. Thus, it will happen.
The D party can kick WWC voters in the teeth with immigration policy and employment policy only so long.
Rural voters won’t go Democratic because Rural Voters aren’t multicultural. Period.
This goes back to the Roman Republic.
What needs to happen is going above gerrymandering.
More Representatives in the House, based on a fixed amount of citizens in a state.
You can only draw some many gerrymandered lines around a bunch of rural tribalists before you end up with a city populations dominating the House districts.
White rural “my tribe, right or wrong” people aren’t going Democratic as long as they remain in their little hidey holes.
Wow. Just read the original article.
You mean there are still Republicans who have both feet planted firmly in objective reality?
These will be the Republicans who end up joining the Democratic party, effectively killing the Republican party, whenever that happens.
Just a few snippets I found refreshing to read from a conservative (because they’re acknowledging reality).
Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level across the most heavily populated sections of the country while intensifying their hold on a declining electoral bloc of aging, white, rural voters.
The biggest Republican victory in decades did not move the map. The Republican party’s geographic and demographic isolation from the rest of American actually got worse.
Democrats have consolidated their power behind the sections of the country that generate the overwhelming bulk of America’s wealth outside the energy industry. That’s only ironic if you buy into far-right propaganda, but it’s interesting none the less.
Vote suppression is working remarkably well, but that won’t last. Eventually Democrats will help people get the documentation they need to meet the ridiculous and confusing new requirements. The whole “voter integrity” sham may have given Republicans a one or maybe two-election boost in low-turnout races. Meanwhile we kissed off minority votes for the foreseeable future.
I disagree that what this country needs is “Republican leadership”, but right after that, the author states:
What are we getting from Republicans? Climate denial, theocracy, thinly veiled racism, paranoia, and Benghazi hearings. Lots and lots of hearings on Benghazi.
Wow. Just wow.
Can we get more Republicans like this, please? While I was conceived right around tax day 1979, I’m not very experienced with 70s-era sane Republicans…well, except for the ones that have (D) after their names, like Clinton and Obama (couldn’t resist).
I’d read it but not noticed this until you quoted it:
This particular guy may have to become a Democrat very soon. The Republicans are absolutely brutal to anybody who goes off the reservation on any topic, especially when going off the reservation entails telling the truth.
Why should Republicans like this try to fight off the Bircher Baggers that have taken over his party when he can just switch and join up with DEM Party neoliberalcon elites that took over the Democratic Party a couple of decades ago. That way 40% of the population will continue to have taxation without representation but there won’t be much internal strife within the two political parties.
Examples of a sane Republican from a few decades ago (keep in mind that crazies have been in their ranks for a very long time) would be the recently deceased former Senator Jim Jeffords and former governor of RI Lincoln Chafee.
Compare Chafee’s and Hillary Clinton’s policy positions and Senate voting records and it becomes clearer that Clinton wouldn’t even have been in the sanest wing of the GOP several decades ago.