All those pundits and GOP establishmentarians who pronounced the tea party dead have some ‘splainin’ to do in the scorched aftermath of the Republican primary that dumped House Majority Leader Eric Cantor from his seat in Virginia’s 7th congressional district.
Tea party candidate Dave Brat trounced Cantor, 55.5 percent to 44.5 percent, in a “shockingly lopsided” vote. As the Richmond Times Dispatch reported Cantor’s defeat:

“This is one of the most stunning upsets in modern American political history,” said Larry Sabato, head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “This is the base rebelling against the GOP leadership in Washington as represented by Eric Cantor.”
“I’m as stunned as anybody,” Sabato said. “I’ve yet to find one person nationally or in the state outside the Brat circle who thought Cantor would be beaten.”

From another perspective in the Times Dispatch report: “I can’t believe that the voters in the 7th District would trade Number 2 and possibly Number 1 in Congress for Number 435 and that shocks me,” said Mike Woods, a longtime Cantor supporter.” Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones, chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said “If ever there was any doubt, tonight’s results prove that extremists have taken over the Virginia Republican Party. Eric Cantor tried to cater to hard-core conservatives, but he failed.”
It looks like Brat’s campaign had excellent GOTV. As Nate Cohn put it at the Upshot, “Turnout was not unusually low: More than 63,000 votes have been counted so far, up from around 47,037 in 2012.” According to this map, it appears Brat’s superior GOTV in the exurbs north of Richmond did the trick.
Pollsters didn’t do too well on this one, as Cohn reports: “…One survey conducted for the Daily Caller by Vox Populi, a new Republican firm, showed Mr. Cantor just over 50 percent and ahead by 12 points. News media accounts suggested that Mr. Cantor’s campaign was confident, and one internal poll showed he had a 34-point advantage.”
Cantor’s huge financial advantage counted for little. If there was a pivotal issue it would likely be immigration, as the Times Dispatch reports:

Brat, dwarfed by Cantor in spending, drummed home the immigration issue, accusing the incumbent of favoring “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. Cantor denied the charge, saying only that children of illegal immigrants should not suffer because their parents brought them into the country…”Everybody agrees that if immigration reform was on life support before, they’re pulling out the plugs,” because no other Republican wants to lose as Cantor did, Sabato said.

If Republicans had dismal prospects for winning Latino votes in 2014, Dems will likely trumpet Brat’s victory as a clear indication that the GOP is moving toward an even more reactionary position with respect to immigration.
The district, which stretches from western Richmond northward to the outskirts of Warrenton (about 50 miles west of Washington, D.C.), northeastward to outer Fredricksburg and northwestward to the ‘burbs of Charlottesville, has been Republican since 1981. VA-7 is redolent with early American and Civil War history, and includes some of George Washington’s childhood stomping grounds.
As currently configured, the district is 74.3% White, 17.1% Black, 4.9% Latino, 3.9% Asian, 0.3% Native American/Alaskan, and 2.1% “other,” according to 2010 Census data. Romney won it with 57 percent to Obama’s 42 percent of votes cast in 2012. Cantor himself won with 58 percent of the votes in the same year.
It will be a tough race for Democrat John “Jack” Trammell, a Randolph-Macon College professor like Brat, and author and father of seven. Charlie Cook gives the district a R+10 “partisan voting index” rating. Yet anything north of Richmond is increasingly fair game for Dems, as D.C. cosmopolites and workers in the state’s exploding high tech corridor along I-95 search for affordable housing.

At The Upshot Nate Cohn explains “How Black Turnout Could Decide Senate Control.”

Black voters will play an outsize role in this year’s fight for control of the Senate. Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia are the three states where African-Americans represent the largest share of the population, and North Carolina isn’t too far behind, at seventh on the list.
According to the Census Bureau, the black share of the national electorate has dropped off in every midterm election since at least 1998. That could cripple Democrats in these states.
…But it is possible to imagine the black share of the electorate holding at 2012 levels in those states, or even increasing. It has happened before.

Cohn shows that Democrat Mary Landrieu “benefited from a small but surprising increase in the black share of the electorate, which rose by 0.6 of a percentage point between 2000 and the 2002 runoff…” and that she would have lost if it had dropped 2.7 percent, as it did in 2010. Landrieu also benefitted by a relative decline in turnout of white voters.
In Georgia, Cohn notes that “1998, black turnout in Georgia increased by 1.7 percentage points above 1996 levels.” Cohn speculates that the uptick was caused by “impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, who was popular among black voters.” Not so sure. The small increase could just as likely be attributed to better GOTV, or a combination of other factors. He notes also that the turnout record during the same period in NC was inconclusive — until Obama ran. Cohn believes the Obama factor might help Democrat Kay Hagan hold her senate seat, and in GA:

…There may still a narrow path for the black share of the electorate to rise beyond 2012 levels in 2014. In Georgia, the black share of the electorate could increase to 31.7 percent, up from 30 percent in 2012, if black turnout remains as high as it was in 2010 and if white turnout falls as it low as it did in 1998, when there was a competitive governor’s race. And although 2012 might represent an unusually high baseline, President Obama’s appeal among black voters also raises the possibility of an unusually high black turnout.

Cohn concludes that “there is room for high black turnout or low white turnout to upset the conventional wisdom. In a close contest in the racially polarized South, such a shift in racial turnout could easily be decisive.”
For Dems, the implications should be clear: Put more resources into registering and turning out African American voters, particularly in GA, NC, LA, AR and MS, but also try to get a little bite of the high turnout white seniors.

Big problems remain and booby traps lie ahead, but “Obama Promised to Do 4 Big Things As President. Now He’s Done Them All,” writes Jonathan Chait. And it’s all the more remarkable, considering the Republicans’ unprecedented obstructionism. Good talking points here for responding knee-jerk Obama critics.
Re Julian Zelizer’s “Will Democrats pay a price for Bergdahl deal?” at CNN Politics. The short answer is “only if voters can be hoodwinked en masse by GOP demagoguery.” The better question is “Will Republicans pay a price for arguing that it’s OK to let an American soldier languish in prison?”
Charles Pierce has a few choice comments on the topic in his “The Bergdahl Chronicles: The Bitchening.” See also John Cory’s “The Empty Soul of GOP Politics” at Reader Supported News, which notes “The air is rife with the flatulence of rancid sanctimonious political opportunism and self-serving patriotic indignation. Truth, fact, and morality be damned…Sgt. Bergdahl was a prisoner of war and America does not leave POW’s behind. Ever. We don’t do it. It doesn’t matter if the POW walked off and got captured or if the POW collaborated with the enemy under duress and torture – doesn’t matter. We, America, bring them back.”
From AP’s “Political parties fight to manipulate voting times“: “At least 33 states now have laws that let people vote in-person before elections without needing an excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. Early voting laws became increasingly common after the disputed 2000 presidential election as a means of diminishing long Election Day lines that had frustrated voters…Republican-controlled legislatures in Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina and Wisconsin all have taken recent steps to curtail early voting by limiting the days on which it’s available…Early voting generally increases voter turnout by 2-4 percent, which is statistically significant, said Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Oregon…Some of the assumptions about early voting have been challenged by recent research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professors there found that early voting that diminishes the publicity surrounding the actual election day can hurt turnout, and ultimately aid Republicans. But they found that when early voting is coupled with same-day registration, the advantage shifts to Democrats.”
The repeal Obamacare movement is now on track to end, “not with a bang, but a whimper,” explains Sam Baker at The Atlantic.
Not that the Republican sniping will end anytime soon, as Greg Sargent points out in his post “GOP’s guerrilla resistance to Obamacare alive and well.”
At Lost Remote, Adam Flomenbaum has an interesting interview with Bill Maher’s executive producer about Maher’s ‘Flip a District’ campaign. Flomenbaum notes that “Maher plans to flip a congressional district in the upcoming mid-term elections by periodically going to specific congressional districts, talking about that congressman, and seeing if “we can’t get some change effected in America.”
At The Upshot, Nate Cohn and Josh Katz argue against the beliefs of many poll analysts that “It’s Not Too Soon to Pay Attention to Senate Polling.”
Democratic candidates and campaign strategists, please study “Map: Where the average student loan burden is largest” and the accompanying notes by Niraj Chokshi. If there is any hope of energizing young voters this year, Dems need to be talking about bold initiatives to address this crisis.

While most of the media attention on June 3 was devoted to Republican primaries, there were plenty of competitive Democratic primaries–especially for the U.S. House–as well. And in an article today for the American Prospect, the co-founders of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Adam Greene and Stephanie Taylor, stake a claim on the results as part of an big progressive wave:

On Tuesday, in competitive primaries from New Jersey to Iowa to California, voters chose bold progressive Democrats over more conservative and corporate Democrats, handing big victories to the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of the Democratic Party.
Indeed, it was Progressive Super Tuesday. And it is the latest chapter in a larger story we’ve seen play out in American politics since the Wall Street economic wreck.
There’s a rising economic populist tide in America, sweeping into office leaders like Senator Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and a growing bloc of progressives in Congress.

While I respect the PCCC and what it’s trying to accomplish, I also think there’s danger in exaggerating intra-Democratic divisions, as I explained at Washington Monthly:

[I]f you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so Green and Taylor are just doing their jobs by suggesting that four primary outcomes are indicia of the March of Progress. But the examples they cite also indicate that any Struggle for the Soul of the Democratic Party occurring on June 3 was a mite less savage than what we are witnessing on the GOP side.
It’s interesting that Daily Kos Elections didn’t even mention ideology in its brief previews of three of the four races PCCC is claiming as victories of “bold progressive Democrats over more conservative and corporate Democrats” (yes, DKE is preoccupied with the nuts and bolts of campaigns rather than messaging, but if these primaries were waged as “struggles for the soul” I’m reasonably sure they would have mentioned it). It’s probably safe to say that in NJ-12 Bonnie Watson Coleman had a more progressive record and message than Linda Greenstein, but Coleman’s legislative leadership position and a money advantage helped, too. The same is true in IA-1, where Pat Murphy benefited from being a former House Speaker, and narrowly avoided being pushed into a district convention amidst a large field. And in CA-17, it’s not all that clear former Obama administration official Ro Khanna ran against Mike Honda “from the right,” as Green and Taylor put it, though I suppose there are tangible ghosts of the New Dem critique of traditional liberalism in Khanna’s claim that the incumbent wasn’t that interested in Silicon Valley’s needs in Washington. It might be premature to claim a victory for Honda as well, since they’ll have a rematch in November with much higher turnout (though Honda definitely outperformed expectations on June 3).
The most interesting characterization by Green and Taylor was of the third-place finisher in CA-33, Wendy Greuel, as “a former Republican with a history of accepting campaign donations from Big Oil and other special interests.” Greuel lost a general election spot to Ted Lieu, “who stood up for the 99 percent.” Just for grins, I looked at Greuel’s endorsement list, and there nestled among such famous reactionaries as Dolores Huerta and Kamala Harris and even Ed Begley, Jr., was none other than Bill de Blasio.
Now ideological labels are slippery, and Green and Taylor have as much right to define them as anybody else. But I don’t think it’s a terribly good idea for Democrats to emulate Republicans in treating their differences as equivalent in significance and heat to the Thirty Years War. I share the POV that the relative diversity of Democratic opinion is on balance a strength rather than a weakness. And while I admire the efforts of PCCC and others to hold candidates accountable for their views and positions, and agree that progressive accomplishments have sometimes been undone or diminished by wayward Democrats, and also agree that primaries are a perfectly valid venue for getting the best representation possible, the fact remains that treating someone like Wendy Greuel as an ideological leper is just bad politics.

As regular readers know, here at TDS we value intraparty openness and civility as a core principle, even as we encourage Democrats to remain true to their progressive values, policy goals, and loyalty to people in need. Those two impulses should not come into conflict, and won’t if we avoid the twin temptations of ignoring or exaggerating our differences.

The marquee contests in this week’s “Super Tuesday” primaries were Republican Senate contests in Mississippi and Iowa. And though the official score card assigned by much of the MSM was a tie in MS and a clear win in IA for the Republican Establishment, a deeper look suggests deeper problems for the GOP, as I explained yesterday at TPMCafe:

Had Thad Cochran eked out the narrow victory early returns seemed to indicate, the results, along with Joni Ernst’s comfortable win in Iowa, might have finally laid to rest the fears of Beltway Republicans that they are in danger of giving away Senate seats via erratic Tea Party nominees like 2010’s Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle and 2012’s Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. A Cochran win would have been especially gratifying to the GOP Powers That Be, given the strong commitment outside conservative groups made to challenger Chris McDaniel, the state’s fertile ideological soil, and the aging incumbent’s inability to adjust to the savage tone and substance of contemporary conservatism.
But now a deeply wounded Cochran faces a three-week runoff campaign in which many factors — especially turnout — favor his opponent. And with the heavy investment of groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth in Mississippi as their best prospect for a Senate RINO “scalp,” it would take a phenomenal effort by the incumbent or a big gaffe by the challenger to change the momentum in this race. When the smoke clears on June 24, Mississippi will likely join Kentucky and Georgia as states where the loss of a Republican Senate seat in November is possible, and the dissipation of GOP resources better spent elsewhere is certain. Beyond that, Republican pols everywhere would know that not even four decades of genial service and effective money-grubbing for a very poor state, or the support of virtually everyone there ever elected to a position above dogcatcher, is enough to survive the ever-rightward tide of the conservative activist “base.”
Looking at Iowa, and more generally the post-primary Senate landscape, a likely Cochran defeat isn’t the only problem facing win-hungry GOP “pragmatists.” Joni Ernst joins North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — and potentially Georgia’s Jack Kingston, if he wins the July 22 runoff — as “Establishment” figures who’ve chosen the easy way to the nomination by adopting the most conservative positions and messages available, thus giving their Democratic opponents important general election talking points. As the king of GOP “pragmatists,” Mitt Romney, showed in 2012, it’s not always so easy to “etch-a-sketch” a new swing-voter friendly persona after spending months rushing to get in front of every movement conservative parade in sight.

Since the smoke cleared in Mississippi Wednesday morning, there have reportedly been agonized conferences involving both local and national Republican poohbahs who aren’t sure whether to go all out for Cochran in a runoff, cut their losses with a reduced financial commitment, or at least instruct Cochran’s campaign to avoid any scorched-earth tactics that might make McDaniel’s general election task more difficult if he’s the nominee. The 2014 primary cycle is not turning out to be a walk in the park for the Republican Establishment after all.

Nia Malika-Henderson presents compelling evidence in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that “Democrats’ ‘war on women’ strategy still works. For now.” Her most encouraging sentence: “In August of 2012, on the eve of a presidential election, 69 percent of women said that they were absolutely certain to vote. Now, that figure stands at 77 percent.”
At CNBC.com John Harwood encapsulates the challenge facing Democrats: “Democrats have begun efforts to mitigate the damage, with their House and Senate campaign committees tripling investments in voter mobilization since the last election. With its sophisticated voter identification and mobilization programs, the 2012 Obama presidential campaign produced a more Democratic-leaning electorate than many Republicans had thought possible. In 2014 battlegrounds such North Carolina and Colorado, vulnerable Senate Democratic incumbents hope to capitalize on the results of those efforts the way Terry McAuliffe did in winning the Virginia governorship last year…Obama’s party can try to motivate Latinos by blaming Republicans for blocking immigration legislation, and women by blaming Republicans for blocking equal-pay and early childhood education legislation. Although Republicans attack the new health-care law to motivate their base, Democrats can warn young voters that repealing it would kick young adults under 26 off their parents’ insurance plans.”
Conservative columnist Byron York laments the GOP’s lack of a coherent/appealing message strategy for 2014.
At The Monkey Cage John Sides’s “Can turnout save the Democrats in 2014?” crunches stats and observes “Turnout is not going to explain a 63-seat gain for Republicans in 2010…The question is how much turnout matters. My sense is that commentators still put too much emphasis on it. That is, there is not enough grappling with what changes in the electorate do not explain — such as, perhaps, the majority of Republican seat gains in 2010. There is not enough grappling with how Democrats did so well in 2006 despite a midterm electorate, as political scientist Michael McDonald has noted. For more, see Mark Mellman’s four excellent columns on this, and especially political scientist Seth Hill’s research.”
Public opinion on the Bergdahl swap is a near-washout. Obama did the right thing and brought an American P.O.W. home. It appears that the GOP wingnut gallery will get no real traction on this one.
The VA dust-up was more damaging, at least in the short run, according to the latest CNN/ORC poll. But the same poll indicates Obama has some offsetting gains with respect to his policies re terrorism and the environment — continuing concerns which may have more shelf life.
David Firestone’s NYT blog post “Joni Ernst Fights for Dirty Water in Iowa” — provides a solid meme for Dems to work. As Firestone elaborates, “That a Senate nominee could take this position, even more than the others, shows how far Republican candidates have drifted from the party’s old moorings. In 1972, the Clean Water Act passed with full bipartisan support, and is widely regarded as one of the most successful environmental acts ever passed. It doubled the number of rivers, streams and lakes suitable for fishing and swimming. It drastically reduced the amount of chemicals in drinking water, and substantially increased the size of protected wetlands. Rivers no longer catch fire…The law’s value is so obvious that it shouldn’t even be necessary to defend it. But in Iowa, it remains a divisive issue, and Ms. Ernst’s offhand remark was a clear signal to the state’s big agricultural interests of which side she is on.” Dems should smell blood on this one, and make Ernst explain it at every opportunity.
At The Upshot Nate Cohn makes a so-so case that Thad Cochran’s senate seat may be out of reach for Dems. But McDaniel isn’t all that, and whether Cohn is right or wrong, making the GOP spend some dough there might be a worthwhile project.
The Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley are less skeptical than Cohn: “Former Rep. Travis Childers, the Democratic nominee in Mississippi, decided to run because of the possibility of a McDaniel win. His gamble looks likelier and likelier to pay off, and this could actually be a race in the fall, particularly if McDaniel stumbles and the runoff is bloody.”

Paul Steinhauser, Ashley Killough and Dana Davidsen have “Top takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries” at CNN Politics. Distilling their conclusions ever so slightly yields:

1. The tea party is still pretty bad-ass in Mississippi, but the old guard incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran may yet win the day in the run-off. It appears that the mini-scandal in which a tea party supporter tried to photograph Sen. Cochran’s ailing wife in the hospital may have prevented a slam dunk win for tea party GOP challenger state Sen. Chris McDaniel. Not that there is a lot of difference between them on policy.The bitter run-off may give Dems a chance for a much-needed pick-up. Ed Kilgore concludes of this race that “you can probably add Mississippi to the list of states where Republicans may have to play defense in a Senate race this fall.”
2. In Iowa, at least, ads mattered. Joni Ernst’s ballsy (pun intended) ad generated a lot of buzz which likely helped her big win in getting the nod to run for U.S. Senate. Democrat Bruce Braley will have to show some moxie to hold this seat for the D’s. Kilgore adds, however, that “Ernst may have really overdone the “I’m more conservative than everybody” routine, and could pay a price in the general election. ”
3. It looks like CA’s open primary helped the more moderate Republican Gov. candidate Neel Kashkari, who beat out state Rep. Tim Donnelly. But no one thinks Democratic Gov. Brown has anything to worry about. Kilgore notes at Washington Monthly that “what we do know is that turnout was terrible; the electorate was likely a lot more conservative than the voters who will show up in November; and the state’s Top Two system creates a lot of strange strategery and sometimes unlikely results.”
4. Mitt Romney did much better as an endorser, than he did as a candidate.

All in all, Dems are still in decent shape looking toward November. there were no big shockers, and nothing that happened yesterday should provoke any trembles among the donkeys.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
It is hard to fathom. Major elements of the once-proud Republican Party have stooped so low that they are systematically attacking an American prisoner of war because they believe it discredits their political adversaries.
Only one word serves to properly describe such behavior: despicable. And the mainstream media outlets that have enabled this attack by taking it seriously are not much better.
Here are the facts:
On Friday, President Obama announced the release of the last American POW in Afghanistan — Bowe Bergdahl. In exchange, five Taliban prisoners were released from Guantanamo Prison into the custody of the Qatari government that had helped broker the prisoner exchange. The Qataris agreed to prevent the Taliban prisoners from returning to Afghanistan for a year, by which time America’s combat role in Afghanistan will have ceased.
Almost immediately, the deal was attacked by Republicans as “negotiating with terrorists” — an act that they say would encourage more “hostage taking.”
In fact, of course the deal was a traditional prisoner exchange — the kind that combatants do regularly at the end of — and often during — wars. Both sides released prisoners of war that were taken by the other on an active battlefield.
The president negotiated the exchange because his overwhelming responsibility was to fulfill his commitment not to leave any American soldier behind when America’s combat role in Afghanistan ends later this year. What would the Republicans have done — let him live out his life in the hands of the Taliban?
You bet this exchange was in the national security interests of the United States, because it sent a message to all of the men and women in the American military — people who have volunteered to risk their lives for their fellow Americans — that our country has their back — that we will not forget them and leave them to die in some far off place once a conflict is over.
In fact many of the critics of the exchange never saw a day of combat in their lives. They stayed safely at home — having dinners at their favorite restaurants, enjoying a round of golf on the weekends — while they demanded that other Americans go to war in the Middle East. And now they have the audacity to question whether it is worth it to exchanging some Taliban prisoners to free one of the people who actually went to fight in their wars?
Many of the loudest critics are precisely the same “chicken hawks” who were the architects of the Iraq War — the greatest security and foreign policy disaster of recent history — premised entirely on intentional lies to the American people. In fact, many of them should have lost the right to be taken seriously on any matter of foreign policy, much less the right to be taken seriously when they — in effect — advocate that an American soldier be left as a POW for the rest of his life.
But the right wing’s attacks did not end with assaults on the prisoner exchange itself. Now they have turned to attack the character of the POW himself and the circumstances in which he was captured.
The bottom line is simple. If Bergdahl’s violation of a rule made him an easier target for capture by the Taliban, it is up to the American military to decide the facts of the case — not the right-wing pundits. And if he should have been disciplined, that’s up to the American military as well — not the Taliban.
Whatever the circumstances, Bergdahl suffered five years of deprivation and hopelessness that is unimaginable to the sanctimonious “chicken hawks” who sat safely by state-side while others fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In fact their attacks are reminiscent of the shameful way America treated returning Viet Nam veterans almost half a century ago.
This time, the “Obama derangement syndrome” that infects the right-wing pundit class has led them into a dark place that is simply over the top — even for them. Their Republican colleagues who are not so deeply infected by this disorder should restrain and silence them for their own good — and to protect what is left of the reputation of what was once a respectable political party.