Chris Cillizza makes a good point on the Electoral College when he points out that it was a major challenge for the Republicans way before they chose Donald Trump as their nominee. In fact, I don’t think the reporting on this has been very good, in general.
There’s often acknowledgement that the RNC did a post-election autopsy in 2012 to determine what they need to do differently, and people write about the fact that the party ignored its own advice with extreme prejudice by becoming more hostile to Latinos and more alienating to young voters. But, what’s not often noted is that there are actual states that the Republicans need to flip into their column to win a presidential election.
Those states are identifiable. We’re talking about minimally winning the states that Bush won, including most importantly Ohio, Florida and Virgina. But to get any margin of error, they need to flip Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or maybe even Michigan.
The party has in no way been focused on this task over the last four years.
Now, Trump probably has some potential to get votes in the Rust Belt that weren’t available to Romney, but that has nothing to do with the party’s strategy for winning this election. They have not spent one moment trying to prepare the ground in the states they need to win.
Rather, they’ve been pushing swing states like Florida, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Nevada into safe or nearly safe Democratic territory.
For some of us who have had one eye on the Electoral College every day for the entirety of Obama’s second term, the Republicans’ behavior has been so detached from the task at hand that this coming election has never seemed much in doubt. It’s like they wanted to hand it to the Democrats on a platter.
By nominating Trump, they’ve at least shuffled the board a little bit. Most likely, they’ve made it worse by putting Georgia and Arizona into the swing state category without doing enough to actually flip any states to them. But this is still better in my opinion, because even a bad longshot bet is a better gamble that a surefire loser.
Either way, though, they have not solved their Electoral College problem.
Which of those states that they have to flip have voter ID laws? Which are gearing up turn-out-the-vote hot-button legislation?
When do we start seeing the “African-Americans for Trump” and “Latinos for Trump” marketing begin with folks like Ben Carson or some captive GOP Latino representative fronting for them?
Democrats should treat all of these states as contested ground just to drive the down-ticket races into their hands. Will they?
Probably not. Hillary in the White House and a Republican Congress is the desired output. That way they can pay back all those bribes and whine to the voters “we had no choice, they controlled Congress but we saved gay marriage, the ACA, and abortion choice (sort of)”.
Yes, that’s why Clinton has fundraised millions and millions of dollars for Democratic Party candidates from coast to coast, because she wants the Republicans to maintain Congressional control. That’s why she has run a successful campaign to gain the POTUS nomination. That’s why she has run a campaign which currently has her 13% ahead of the pending Republican Party nominee nationally, making it likely that she will provide coattails. That’s why so many in the conservative movement are openly preparing for Republicans to get smashed up and down the ticket in November.
Didn’t you read how that fundraising was a fraud with the money kicked back to the Clinton campaign?
Hillary Victory Fund. It was a money-laundering scheme to avoid donation limits. Apparently legal, or she’s too big to indict.
Provide coattails? Are you serious? This is already shaping up to be the presidential campaign of who people hate least. In the past, such elections have provided very weak, if any coattails. And since the Democrats need to reclaim/keep a larger number of seats than the GOP, the chances do not look good.
I find it hilarious that the math is roughly the same as Sanders winning the nomination as for Clinton having any useful coattails. For Sanders the “experts” claim he has no chance and his supporters should just accept it, yet the coattails argument is used as justification of why everyone should rally around her, unify the party, and just STFU already.
Simply amazing.
to be honest..
I don’t worry about Latinos for Trump.
Main reason being, the only part of the media who has been covering Trump – the real Trump, without any pretense of trying to kiss his ass or Whitesplain him in any way, is the Spanish-speaking media geared towards the Latino community. They have been on him all along.
The disconnect between the attempt to normalize him in the MSM versus what’s in the Latino Media is vast, which is why Country Last whined about it last week.
As for Blacks for Trump – if led by Slave Catchers like Carson, who has all but destroyed his reputation that he had in the Black community with his run….well……
This is precisely why we’ve seen the recent-ish outbursts and water testing around strategic states, which are republican controlled, changing their electoral college allotment to be proportional rather than winner-take-all. So, they could change, say Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and a few others which would stack the deck in their favor again (obviously they’d not change any solidly republican states).
If they really believe that it’s a lost cause, I fully expect that they’ll seriously try to game the system to attempt to win regardless.
Yeah. I have been wondering why they have been shy about just doing it. They completely control a couple of those purple states.
I can think of a few reasons – too obvious, they’d hope to win the state and all of its votes sometime down the road, and proportional EVs mean that your state as a whole may be viewed as less important than winner-take-all states, meaning less time/cash from candidates.
probably because it would be so obvious they think it could back fire
I remember when a couple states thought about doing it before the 2012 election. There was a public outcry calling it cheating and those states backed down almost instantly.
Anecdata: This weekend on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” P.J. O’Rourke, in announcing he plans to vote for Hillary despite how thoroughly he detests her, said, “She is wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
It will be interesting to see how pervasive that mindset will prove to be among normally rock-solid Republicans.
of prominent GOPers taking essentially the same tack. I do wonder how much influence that may have (or not!) on the rank-and-file (presumably none on Trump’s Rubes; but I wonder about the not-quite-so-far-gone majority of GOPer/leaners).
P.J. was clearly playing to the NPR audience for gasps and shocked laughs with his announcement — and got ’em — but when he mentioned as part of his rationale the impossibility of letting Trump have access to the launch codes I heard genuine disquiet under the humorous bluster. I suspect that sort of prospective dread may drive some fraction of Republican voters to vote against him. How significant a fraction? We shall see.
We’re talking about pretty much every Republican who is getting enough oxygen to the head.
. . . what proportion do you suppose that is? (Rhetorical kidding, here. Well, mostly.)
In retrospect the last 48 years have been serendipitous for Republicans.
They never changed their policy preferences from the 1920’s, pre-New Deal. And eventually the country came around to embrace them in the civil rights era backlash and ironically the Nixon/Burns mismangement of the economy that got blamed on Carter plus Vietnam.
They won’t change this time either.
I think the coming era is going to look like the mirror image of the post-Civil War era (1860 – 1908) when Republicans won 11 of 13 presidential elections. The Democrats have already won the popular vote in 6 of 7 – they could win the next 6 if the recessions are timed right (early in term).
If TR / Bull Moose hadn’t run in 1912, the Republicans would have won 16 of 18 elections until 1932.
The Republicans are as much on the wrong side of history since the 1990’a as the Democrats were in the 1860’s.
The republicans don’t have to win any more elections. The new Democrats will do the all the Republicanizing necessary. The PTB don’t need the racists, fundies or homophobes. They just need a party that will stop persecuting the smallest minority in America — the billionaires.
Yeah, Hillary is essentially a Republican. That’s clearly a well-informed and empirically based opinion.
She is essentially a Rockefeller republican. L. Kevin Coleman writes:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/3/10/1499453/-Welcome-to-the-United-States-of-Amnesia-where-Hilla
ry-Clinton-is-the-only-real-Republican-candidate
“The Democratic party today is not much different from the average Republican of the pre-1980’s. Remember “liberal Republicans” like former presidential candidates Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, and Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, Governor of Michigan? Of course not. That amnesia thing again. So, now we have Hillary Clinton as the chosen one of the democratic establishment, running as a “progressive.” But if we can’t remember what happened 20 or 30 years ago, we’re certainly not going to remember that the first “progressive,” over 100 years ago, was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) – the one who caused the first major rift in the Republican Party. That rift was significant enough that Theodore’s distant cousin and virtual worshipper, Franklin (1933-1945), had to become a Democrat to carry on Theodore’s progressive agenda. And the candidate who most carries forward the agenda of the two Roosevelt presidents is Bernie Sanders – running on the Democratic ticket, but registered as an Independent and a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist.”
“Confused yet? Well, perhaps that’s part of the reason for the amnesia. It’s very, very convenient for the comfortable elites – including those elites who control 90% of the mainstream media in the U.S.A. through the 6 corporations which own it – who wish the rest of us would just forget the past, so we can’t judge the present, and just plain give up on the future.
….
“For the Republican elites, they can’t remember that they got what they prayed for: the bigot, racist, xenophobic, just plain scared-and-pissed-off-at-everything vote. The same voters they never gave a wit for anyway, using them as cover for passing the loot on up the chain while handing crumbs back down
….
“For the Democratic elites, an eerie inverse image: Being amnesiacs themselves, they couldn’t remember what they had been about before they became the new Republicans, lulled into unconsciousness by Clinton charm and rhetoric. This was an illusion that was easy to maintain as the new new Republicans moved into fascist, to-the-right-of-Genghis-Kahn territory, allowing them to think of themselves as “left.” Relatively speaking, perhaps, but not a “left” in any real sense, because what remains is the moderate right (the Clintonian “left”), the far right, and the out to lunch straight off the cliff right. Which is why Hillary still feels justified in calling herself a “progressive;” and why she has become ever more uncomfortable and defensive when a Bernie Sanders, the most Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt-esque progressive on the national scene, occupies the same stage next to her. She will invariably fall back on her poster issues – women’s rights, gun control, gay-lesbian-transgender rights; not unworthy issues in themselves, but a nice side-step away from the things that might offend and alienate her big money supporters. Like, say, the excess of corporate and financial interest powers; her support for the hush-hush, privately negotiated for narrow private interests international trade agreements; her prevarications over her support of the oil and gas business destruction of our planet; and her hawkish support for American covert and military intervention anywhere and everywhere to ‘protect’ alleged but never, ever defined, much less comprehensible, “American interests.” After all, those private, narrow business interests are quite happy to take the money of gays, lesbians, women, single-moms and gun-control advocates, not to speak of supplying military armaments and support. And Hillary can conveniently use the issues of the first groups as shiny objects to divert attention away from her corporate friends who with rapacious greed continue to shift their obligations to society downwards, further hollowing out the ever shrinking middle class and liberally distributing poverty across the country.
“So there we have it: On one side, the last, traditional Republican, Hillary Clinton, versus the last true progressive in the Roosevelt mold, Bernie Sanders.”
Thanks for proving my point.
I’d say most modern Dem politicians don’t even rise to the quality of TR’S progressive Good Govt aspirations.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/where-is-amy-klobuchar-how-democratic-indifference-is-squande
ring-a-unique-moment-on-antitrust-policy.html
Compare and contrast…http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/politics-reform/essays/square-deal-theodore-roosevelt-an
d-themes-progressive-reform
Allow me to agree with David Adkins…I remain convinced that even if we were to eliminate every form of race, gender, orientation and other prejudice in the United States, the biggest and most obnoxious forms of predatory economic injustice would remain, in the form of the abuse of the 99.9% by the .1% of asset-holding rent seekers who control most of the wealth and nearly all of the political power. When Clinton responds to Sanders’ anti-Wall Street bromides by saying that there are other barriers to equality as well, it sounds less like social inclusion than it does deflection…
Whether or not the Dems rise to TR’s good government aspirations, it’s clear that not one of them sinks to his appalling levels or racism and imperialism in the Philippines, Panama, and other places.
I’d take Hillary over TR any day.
Oh, I am gutted. How predictable your comeback.
Dems until the ’80s stood up to oligarchs through govt. These days they excuse them and promote them and come up with public/private kludges that cost more and deliver less.
Of course it was a predictable comeback: it should be obvious that TR did some good things and some atrocious things. More importantly, it should be obvious that it makes no sense to compare any contemporary politician to one who governed over a century ago. The issues have changed completely, so any comparison will inevitably be specious.
No. The issues are always the same. The frame has been knocked awry since the ’80s. By design.
So timely…http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/business/economy/as-jobs-vanish-forgetting-what-government-is-for.
html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
During much of the 19th and 20th centuries, government at multiple levels played an essential role in shaping the nation’s transition from farms and small towns to cities and factories. It could do so again. What has stopped it is not the lack of practical ideas but the encrusted ideological opposition to government activism of any kind. …
Why American politics turned against this successful model of pragmatic policy-making remains controversial. Perhaps it was the increasing footprint of money in politics, which has given more clout to corporate interests lobbying for smaller government and lower taxes. …
“… not one of them sinks to his appalling levels or racism and imperialism in the Philippines, Panama, and other places.”
True, but that’s not what we were discussing. But since you raised the issue, imperialism has been replaced by interventionism, and Hillary is very close to Kissinger and seems to favor “projecting power” in that way. Such as the Honduras Coup.
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-hillary-clinton-militarized-us-policy-in-honduras/
I don’t know what “average Republican” means, but if you knew any history you would know that the moderate, or so-called Rockefeller, Republicans dominated the GOP from the end of WW2 to 1964, when Goldwater beat Nelson Rockefeller for the nomination. And there were still plenty of them around for years after that. Of course Goldwater represented those farther to the right, in many cases much farther.
This is the kind of Republicanism that was promoted in the most widely read magazines of the time, Life, Time, Readers Digest, as well as most newspapers and broadcast media.
Working-class Democrats found the “moderate” Republicans far enough to the right, especially on labor vs corporations, Wall Street, etc., military and international affairs. But they were quite liberal on social issues, including civil rights and welfare.
Hillary was a Goldwater Girl in 1964, but in college she was against the Vietnam War and supported civil rights. Not unusual for an Illinois Republican in those days. Even during that time, she supported first Nixon, then Nelson Rockefeller. From the early 1970s, after meeting Bill, she was a Democrat.
The fact that she was brought up a Republican is secondary. I am just saying her current priorities are very much those of a moderate Republican of a kind that is close to extinct in the actual GOP.
Coleman knows very well what he’s talking about. Add I imagine you don’t remember. because you are probably too young to remember. But I do remember very well. So does Bernie Sanders, by the way.
Found this excellent blog on the intersection of economics and politics of the possible…https:/weapedagogy.wordpress.com
It is very worthwhile studying the propaganda tactics used by economics textbooks to get innocent students to believe in absolutely incredible myths about how the economy works. In the entering class of graduate students in the Ph.D. Economics program at Stanford, most of us were motivated to study economics in order to solve the major economic problems we could see around the globe. We wanted to help solve problems of poverty, and create better lives and prosperity. During the course of our studies, we were taught to believe that free markets solve all economic problems automatically, and the main economic problem is do-gooders (like us) and governments, who wish to help. If everyone would pursue their self-interest, it would automatically lead to the best economic outcomes for all. The ideals of serving humanity were washed out of us, and replaced by the pursuit of personal ambitions. Julie Nelson has beautifully captured this brainwashing process in a paper entitled “Poisoning the Well: How Economic Theory Damages the Moral Imagination.” She states people would act in socially responsible ways, but are pushed by the economic theory of self-interested utility maximization to believe that it is permissible to be irresponsible, opportunistic, and selfish in when participating in markets. She describes the large number of ways that economic theory counters natural moral instincts, and the tremendous harm that has resulted to societies as a result of this immorality taught by economics.
Yup. There is no special class of actions that is beyond ethics and morality. Least of all economics, which involves all people everywhere. and on the basis of which, all economically based actions and projects are either made possible or impossible. For example, when you buy bonds issued by a state energy company, you are enabling the projects they are planning to do. Do you even know what they are? When you buy stock in a company, that company may be destroying rain forests for rubber or palm oil plantations, driving indigenous people off their land, depriving endangered animals of their last habitats. And this is what is actually going on, every day of the week.
Good site. The point about GNP is very well made. GNP takes no account of the DISTRIBUTION of wealth, which has become grossly uneven and is getting more so all the time. Or as she puts it, it ASSUMES a trickle-down effect that doesn’t exist for most people.
How much busier then they following should the GOP have been?
Blue/Purple States – GOP wins
2013 Gubernatorial elections:
NJ – Christie
2014 Gubernatorial elections
Re-elected
FL — Rick Scott
IA – Branstad
ME – LaPage
MI – Snyder
NV – Sandoval
NM – Martinez
OH – Kasich
WI – Walker
Gains:
MD – Hogan
MA – Baker
2014 – Senate Gains:
CO -Gardner
IA – Ernst
NC – Tillis
You missed Rauner in Illinois.
Yes. Probably shouldn’t have included NJ either because it would take a seismic shift for them to flip.
And it all has fuck-all to do with winning suburban voters in the Philly suburbs.
I was only challenging your claim that the GOP has done fuck all since ’12. Not making any projections for ’16.
Nobody seriously thinks that NJ will flip to the GOP column just because it re-elected Chripie. As the red tide didn’t hit PA in ’14, it should remain blue this year (at least at the Presidential level).
You were challenging a claim I did not make.
Sorry, Booman wrote about the Electoral College. Not sure how this list relates.
Sorry — almost all the EC votes are state based and winner take all. It’s probably as daunting for the GOP this year as it was for Dems in ’04. But many of the state trends don’t favor Democrats, and therefore, it seems rational to acknowledge that.
What state trends don’t favor Democrats? Specifically, what states does Trump have a reasonable shot at flipping?
Even more specifically, there’s no way Trump takes the electoral college without Florida. What has he and the GOP done to flip that? Rick Scott’s approval rating is 48%; Lil Marco’s is 31%. Even Obamacare is supported by a plurality. (Those are PPP numbers from 3/1).
Sorry — Rick Scott’s approval is 38%, not 48%.
And yet, voters knew what he was when they re-elected him. Just like Brownback.
Right, but that has nothing to do with my comment.
He won for three reasons:
(1) The GOP has more reliable (old, white) voters, which gives them an advantage in mid-terms,
(2) The economy began gaining steam just as he was running for reelection, allowing him to ride the wave, and
(3) The dysfunctional Florida Dems ran Charlie Crist for reasons no one (even said Florida Dems) seems to be able to articulate.
if I had to guess about Charlie Crist it has to do with name recognition in FL but Democrats still ran a candidate which split the vote
That was the Senate campaign vs Rubio. The gubernatorial was one-on-one.
And yet the Republicans enjoy majority or total control in all of those contested states, as well as Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina.
They may be safe territory in presidential contests. Where midterm elections come into play, they are blood red and it’s the Democrats who are making no effort to reclaim them.
The GOP is okay with that. Eventually they will be able to suppress enough votes and lower turnout in a presidential contest to the point where they can take the Oval Office, and then it’s game over.
The Republicans have an electoral college problem, yes. The Democrats have an everything the fuck else problem.
Can we take this as a commentary on Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s job?
I gather that the Evil Debbie Wasserman Schultz, handmaiden to the Evil Clintons, is also responsible for suppressing turnout by young people in states like Wisconsin. You know, because the Democrats gave them no reason to turn out. So they got GOP control and thus disinvestment in, say, higher education, along with more legislation to control their bodies. But that’s OK because the Democrats gave them no reason to vote because they’re no different than Republicans, except for the fact that the Democrats opposed all that legislation that fucked up young people.
Who is getting paid to do a job in this scenario? We are not entitled to their damn votes.
I have an expectation of awareness on the part of potential voters. If, say, a candidate campaigns voting to attack the state university system, people with a stake in that system should be aware of that fact without requiring that “we” tell them so.
Here, you can see it is a bipartisan work in progress to privatize higher education–no more Commons for you! You will find bright blue states in this list.
http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.a
spx
But usually the fingerprints are not so blatant as you suggest. It is all part of the budgeting process, ya know?
Ha Ha Ha Most Americans can’t even tell you their Congressman’s name much less their policy stands or legislative votes.
If you think you can run a campaign based on voters getting information by themselves, you are sadly mistaken.
Opposing GOP legislation is completely different than standing for something that is appealing to the younger demographic to get the to vote. Bernie understands this, DWS does not.
No, they’re not “blood red” during midterms. Virginia and Colorado have Democratic governors elected during midterms, NM and MI both have a senator elected during midterms, and two of NM’s three congresspeople are Dems. The Democrats also have the State House in CO.
While midterm turnout is a problem, all of those states are becoming more Democratic.
Demographics. People vote for Team red or team Blue without having the foggiest idea what the policy issues are.
Do you have any support for that? It seems somewhere between wildly counterintuitive and demonstrably wrong.
” … way before they chose Donald Trump as their nominee.”
Did they?
“the party ignored its own advice with extreme prejudice by becoming more hostile to Latinos and more alienating to young voters.”
The part of the party that gave that advice was not the same part of the party that ignored it.
You talk about the party “as if” they have been acting “with one mind”. That’s been their whole problem, they have not been, and it wasn’t under control. Boner was sitting on the lid of that boiling cauldron, and finally even he had to get off.
Booman, what I’ve learned here is that you, by dint of having had “one eye on the Electoral College every day for the entirety of Obama’s second term,” are responsible not only for the re-election of Chris Christie–you have, after all, admitted your nefarious connection to the state of New Jersey–but also for failing to prevent boneheaded decisions by the DNC. The only reason you shall be forgiven is that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the D’s and R’s anyway.
The polls were skewed.
There is a fundamental misconception about the Electoral College and the Popular Vote.
There are not nearly as disconnected as people think.
A 5 point shift nationally to Trump would remake the map. – because the same shift would occur in the individual states.
Trump’s problem isn’t with Colorado and Virginia. It’s with the American Electorate at large. Polling in the states are symptoms of the larger disease. The cure for one is the same as the cure for the other.
But in Trump’s case his problems in each are likely terminal.
Who is the Sec of State in these purple states? The ones counting the votes? Running the elections? Oops.
Do you think Trump can make this election close enough to steal like in 2000. Several months ago, I wondered, but at this point, I just don’t see it.
I think they would have tried for Jeb!/?, but for Trump? I dunno. They could make things interesting…
They can get what they really want for HRC, so why support a wild card like Trump. They have decades of history of the Clinton’s staying bought.
Those matter very little. Only in an insanely close election as Florida is that going to matter.
Voter ID laws definitely help Trump at the margins – but they alone are not going to save Trump.
The sad thing is, the oligarchs are most likely completely happy with this outcome. Just enough crumbs to keep the masses from rioting, while still able to grab more power and money for themselves.
They don’t want Drumpf to win, they prefer a Clinton victory and a GOP congress.