Jennifer Granholm, who knows how to deliver a fierce convention speech, has some message tips for Dems heading into 2016.
A little louder on this, Dems.
Larry Sabato & co. tier out the Dem and GOP presidential fields. It’s early yet, but it’s hard to see any of the GOP wanna-bes generating much excitement, while Dems have two big-buzz potential candidates already.
Why the turnout trend is even scarier than we thought.
Here’s a disturbing look at the Alabama Democratic party, which is not atypical of the problems state Democratic parties face throughout the South. At least someone is writing about how to begin fixing them.
Mona parrots the GOP is “the manly Daddy party” meme and shows what columnists on deadline do when they have nothing to say.
Sheri and Alan Rivlin have a good Huffpo roundup of mid-term post mortems, including some salient thoughts of TDS editors and contributors.
Heaven forbid students should learn anything from one of history’s most influential thinkers, says the neo-McCarthyist Weekly Standard.
These guys are hilarious. Here’s hoping they get more into political satire.

Writing at The Hill, Democratic strategist James Carville addresses a question much on the minds of Democratic activists and operatives everywhere: “Why do people vote against their interests?” Carville, co-author of “It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!” with TDS founding editor Stan Greenberg, focuses here more on the phenomena of well-off voters casting their ballots for Republicans — even when the record shows that the economy and the stock market do substantially better under Democratic Administrations.

A chief complaint of many Republicans is that Asian-Americans and Jews strongly support and vote for Democrats despite the affluent economic standing many have achieved. Similarly, Democratic strategists struggle to understand why 77 out the 100 poorest and most government-dependent counties in the United States voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
But the people who consistently and overwhelmingly vote in large numbers against their interests are stock market investors.
I have no earthly idea why a stock market investor would vote Republican — all you have do is look at the numbers. The numbers are staggering, breathtaking and unimaginable. How anyone with even a penny in the market would vote for their interests and choose a Republican is unexplainable.

It’s true. One of the biggest myths in American politics is that the Republicans are better for business. Carville continues:

Since Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, Standard & Poor’s 500 index has gone up approximately 115 percent, the Dow Jones industrial average has experienced a growth rate of 146 percent and, perhaps most impressively, Nasdaq has grown in size by 188 percent. Two thousand days into his presidency, the major stock indexes under Obama have had average gains of 142 percent — compare that to the record under Reagan, who saw gains at 88 percent during that same time period.
Russ Britt of MarketWatch notes, “the average stock-market gain under four post-Depression Democrats through each one’s 2,000th day in office has outpaced the average gain of the four Republicans in the era by a factor of nearly 4 to 1. Democratic gains have averaged 133%, while Republican market advances have had a mean of 33%.”

Obviously such stats have not been lost on Warren Buffet and a few more of the most savvy business leaders. For the most part, however, stock market investors and other well-off business leaders parrot the GOP party line that Obama and Democrats are bad for business — against all credible evidence. Nonetheless, as Carville concludes,

Political pundits will spend the next few months asking questions about presidential candidates’ qualifications and if they will be able to make tough decisions. The one thing we do know, thanks to history, is that that stock market is likely to do well if Democrats win. If the stock market is among your considerations, I will close with the findings of the two foremost experts on this topic and the larger comparisons of economies under Republican and Democratic presidents, Princeton University professors Mark W. Watson and Alan Blinder:
“The U.S. economy not only grows faster, according to real GDP and other measures, during Democratic versus Republican presidencies, it also produces more jobs, lowers the unemployment rate, generates higher corporate profits and investment, and turns in higher stock market returns. Indeed, it outperforms under almost all standard macroeconomic metrics.”
With such glaring facts and evidence, I ask stock investors to reexamine, reconsider and reinvest their confidence in the Democratic Party. Franklin Roosevelt was famously called by his fellow affluent Americans a “traitor to his class.” Well, if history was any guide, FDR wasn’t a traitor at all. He was the first in a series of Democratic presidents whose policies benefited the same wealthy people who railed against him.

Carville doesn’t probe the psychology of political self-delusion that leads so many business people to vote against their economic interests. A list of possible reasons might include the fact that not all successful business people are that smart, or even well-informed about the record Carville examines. Then there’s also the politics of resentment — some people are more comfortable voting their knee-jerk resentments over their interests. In the case of business people who voted against Obama and other Democratic candidates, there is probably some racism, thinly-disguised with a veneer of economic cliches that don’t hold up under scrutiny. And there will always be the tax-haters who like Republicans because they advocate reducing their taxes, along with gutting programs that benefit less well-off people.
In recent years, there has been an even larger discrepancy between the voting patterns of white working-class voters in many states and their economic interests, which are under almost constant assault by Republican politicians. From tax cuts for the rich financed by massive budget cuts for needed services, to undermining unions, opposing an increase the minimum wage, to restricting health care coverage, to outsourcing to refusing to invest in infrastructure upgrades, Republicans are engaged in relentless pursuit of policies that reduce the real income of workers. Yet majorities of white workers continue to vote for Republicans in most states.
It’s regrettable that so many voters don’t look at the big picture, and get it that the economy does better under Democratic leadership, which benefits everyone and gives America a more livable society. No magic cures here. As always, the only remedy for ignorance is education. Dems have to do a better job of widely-sharing the economic realities Carville has presented here.

“Democrats Divided on Their Path to 2016,” argue Karen Tumulty and Sean Sullivan at Washington Post Politics. But I would say it’s a good thing for two reasons: (1.) The best time for a big tent party to debate major policy differences is right after an election to help shape the agenda (2.) The progressive case against the spending bill has to be presented in a big way to affirm the left voice in the Democratic Party and move the needle of ‘centrist’ Dems leftward. A consensus presidential candidate will need some left cred. I’d worry more if there were no divisions being aired at this point.
No doubt many Democrats who voted for the spending bill agree with Elizabeth Warren’s analysis, but felt like killing the bill would let the more Republican incoming congress pass an even worse bill and would run the risk of blaming the government shutdown on Democrats. Such purely strategic considerations notwithstanding, E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes a worthy point in his latest syndicated column in noting “negotiating in this way rewards those who use shutdown threats as a form of hostage-taking. If the reasonable side regularly makes concessions to unreason, the extremists win.”
Wouldn’t it be great if some “political athletes” would get involved in voter registration and turnout campaigns?
From Nate Cohn’s “Obama’s Immigration Move Benefits Democrats Where It Counts” at The Upshot: “A month after President Obama’s decision to defer deportation and offer work authorization to millions of undocumented immigrants, his action not only looks like a winner, but it also seems to be a fairly promising sign for Democrats after the disastrous midterm elections last month…A Pew Research poll conducted last week showed that 81 percent of Hispanics supported the immigration action, as did 64 percent in a Gallup poll conducted between Nov. 24 and Dec. 8.”
Re Brendan Nyhan’s Upshot post “Our Unrealistic Hopes for Presidents,” going forward, presidential accomplishments will depend even more on the President’s party having a healthy majority in both the Senate and House.
At The Federalist W. Bradford Wilcox explains why “It’s Not Just The Economy Devastating Working-Class Families.” Wilcox says “Andrew Cherlin’s magisterial “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America” provides a cogent, concise, and largely compelling account of why marriage is floundering in working-class communities, and flourishing in more affluent, college-educated ones. His account shows that conservatives “who insist that family changes are wholly a matter of cultural shifts” are as wrong as progressives who insist that America’s family problem is simply a “matter of economics alone.” Instead, Cherlin deftly points out how shifts in the economy and the culture have together combined to undercut the health of marriage and the stability of family life in working-class communities across the country.”
So what is the Democratic left’s alternative economic agenda? Sen. Bernie Sanders rolls it out in 12 points at 21st Century Democrats.
In his New York Review of Books article “Now We Face 2016!,” Michael Tomasky notes, “It must be said that the Democrats’ main problem in this election was economic. While many indicators are positive, wages in the middle are flat. In fact, median household income was lower in 2012 ($51,017) than it was in 2008 ($53,644), not a record that would inspire workers to vote.”
Dream on.

Progressive Democrats are angry about the sweet deal for bankers and big corporate contributors to political campaigns in the $1+ trillion spending bill, but fears of a shutdown may insure passage anyway, report Lori Montgomery and Sean Sullivan at the Washington Post. Elizabeth Warren is leading the vocal opposition to the bill: “…Warren said the changes in the spending bill “would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.” She added: “These are the same banks that nearly broke the economy in 2008 and destroyed millions of jobs.”
Let’s hope this trend for the worse is short-lived. As reported by Dalla Sussman’s “Americans Have Become More Accepting of Use of Torture” at The Upshot: “Fifty percent of Americans in an Associated Press-NORC poll conducted in August 2013 said torture against terrorism suspects to obtain information about terrorism activities could often or sometimes be justified, while 47 percent said it could rarely or never be justified. But partisanship is a factor, with Democrats less supportive than Republicans. In the A.P.-NORC poll, 40 percent of Democrats said torture could be justified sometimes or often. That rose to 55 percent among independents and 61 percent among Republicans.”
According to a nationwide, bipartisan survey conducted for the American Lung Association by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Perception Insight, “By a more than 3-to-1 margin, voters believe that the EPA, not Congress, should be setting pollution standards. This includes large majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans…Voters rate clean air as a higher priority than reducing regulations on businesses. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, voters rate clean air as a higher priority over reducing regulations with 80 percent of voters rating clean air as extremely or very important…A majority of voters (63 percent) support standards for methane emissions. After hearing a balanced debate on both sides, support increases overall to 66 percent. In particular, Republicans move from 39 percent supporting to 53 percent supporting.”
John Guida has yet another “Should Democrats Write Off the South?” ramble, this one a New York Times “OpTalk” post. Pretty much the same ole ‘let’s pretend VA, NC and FL are not in the south’ riff to facilitate projection of a simplistic grand strategy.
Dave Weigel’s “Can Democrats Ever Compete for the Deep South? Should They Even Bother?” at Bloomberg Politics and John Cassidy’s New Yorker article, “Should the Democrats Give Up on the South?” explore the same theme. FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten doubts the permanence of the GOP’s southern sweep.
There’s lots of buzz about Michael Tomasky’s zinger-rich Daily Beast post “It’s Time to Dump Dixie,” which eloquently vents the disgust many of us who live in the south feel about our midterm electorate. Hindsight is always 20-20, and the resources invested in the failed campaigns of Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn in GA, for example, might have produced better results for Kay Hagan, who lost in NC by less than 2 percent. But I would agree with Ed Kilgore’s reality check that, generally “the national party did not really undertake any “concessions” to the South. So there’s no reason to swear off the South as an evil conservative seductress tempting Democrats to stray from the paths of righteousness.” In a way, the Dems dumped Dixie a while back, rightly or wrongly. All of that said, most major southern cities have progressive mayors, and that’s where the party-building should continue.
If The New Republic somehow gets revived, the editors should give Ta-Nehisi Coates’s critique at The Atlantic about the magazine’s staff diversity and reporting on racial injustice a sober reading.
It’s way early for 2016 Senate race prognostication, but Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik estimates that “because the Democrats need to net four or five seats to take control, depending on the party of the next vice president, the Democrats’ opening odds to win the majority are significantly less than 50-50.” As for the House, Kondik says “Our early expectation is that the Democrats will net at least a few House seats in the 2016 election,” but not enough to win a majority. We say upsets can come from all directions.
At Democracy: A Journal of Ideas Eric Alterman explains why mainstream reformist Democrats need the party’s radical left flank: “Constructive radical critiques serve two primary purposes: They provide a vision for the future, and they remind liberals not to get too comfortable with the here and now…Much has changed in American liberalism since the New Deal, but nothing quite so much as the loss of its fighting spirit. “I welcome their hatred,” bragged the self-described “militant liberal” Franklin Roosevelt of the “economic royalists” who sought to retain a status quo that operated by and for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Radicals of the day helped sustain some of that spirit, as well as planting many of the ideas that FDR and others helped bring to fruition. Our not-so-militant liberals of today could damn sure use some of that kind of help.”

From former DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-NY), reported by Kate Nocera at Buzzfeed: “The Republicans have done a much better job of laddering up taxes and spending where Democrats ladder down to 16-point plans. That’s our problem,” Israel said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “We have to the ladder up to that one theme that voters identify with…. We’re building out an infrastructure we’ve never built out before.”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent laments the Democrats’ position at the state level, and wonders if “the Democrats’ best near-term hope for winning back the House may be a Republican president who is unpopular enough to trigger big Dem wave elections, like those in 2006 and 2008.”
The “Dems should skip the south” argument is back, big-time, notes Sargent in another post. No one doubts that the GOP has a lock on most southern states, but the case is always compromised with the rather large exceptions of FL, NC and VA, the 3rd, 10th and 12th largest states. Still, the electoral votes of GA, the 8th most populous state, are probably out of reach in 2016, and it may be wiser to put campaign resources in the other three.
Kyle Trystad wonders “What’s Next for Michelle Nunn?” at Roll Call. Democrat Nunn lost her race for U.S. Senate to David Perdue by 8-points, but left a good impression on political observers, who noted that she became a much more confident debater and speaker by the end of the campaign. It seems unlikely, however, that she could best the popular Republican Senator Johnny Isakson in 2016, who perfectly fits the genteel reactionary style Georgians seem to like in their Senators.
James Hohmann’s Politico post, “Can Southern Democrats make a comeback? The populist, middle class “vision” that could turn it around for them” offers a slightly sunnier take on Democratic prospects in the south. Hohmann notes, “Former Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove said…Democrats need a broader, more comprehensive plan. “To me, the sweet-tea-and-grits crowd still likes our economic issues,” said Musgrove, who served from 2000 to 2004 and narrowly lost a 2008 Senate race. “Democrats need an economic message based on opportunity: education, job training, infrastructure rebuilding, and even health care – where voters know that Democrats can make a difference in these issues…[Atlanta Mayor Kasim] Reed praised Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine in 2012 and Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2013 for not running away from Obama, espousing progressive principles and aggressively attacking their opponents. “The Virginia model is the model we need to follow in the South,” he said.
In similar vein Caitlin Huey-Burns explains “How Democrats Can Get Their Mojo Back” at Real Clear Politics.
The election of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to head the Democratic Governors Association may signal a new emphasis on strengthening state parties in the mountain west, says Reid Wilson at The Washington Post.
For a disheartening tale of meddlesome digerati screwing around in political journalism, read Dana Milbank’s WaPo column, “The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes.” TNR had threaded numerous crises over the decades to become a reliable source of nuanced progressive political analysis. But now it’s suddenly gone. Is there no chance that a wealthy liberal can somehow clean up this mess?
The demise of The New Republic is not the only indication that American journalism has taken a turn for the worse.

Michael Tomasky is lead dog for this edition of TDS Notes with his must-read Daily Beast post “Democrats Are Petrified of Defending Government–but They Need to Start.” There’s a lot here worth quoting, but I’ll just go with this excerpt and demand that every sentient Democrat read the rest of it: “This hatred of government we see in this country is sickeningly childish and hypocritical. The rot starts from the top–the appalling Republican members of Congress who voted against the 2009 stimulus and then had the audacity to go cut ribbons in their districts at venues given life because of that very stimulus bill they traduced as Satan’s handiwork…But it extends down to the millions of people who accept and applaud the right-wing rhetoric even as they suck on the government tit every day of their lives in one way or another, either without knowing it or (worse) knowing it but denying that they do because they’ve stuffed their own heads full of some nonsense narrative about how tough and independent they are.”
A month out from the red wave, Sean Miller of Campaigns & Elections ‘Shop Talk’ presents a panel discussion addressing a question many campaign managers must be wondering: “Is a Digital Obsession Handicapping Campaigns?”
At Brookings Fred Dews addresses an interesting question, “Is Compulsory Voting a Solution to America’s Low Voter Turnout and Political Polarization?” and quotes from a TDS founding editor: “Senior Fellow William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, imagines a “future in which Americans must vote, or face a penalty.” In that hypothetical future, Galston sees campaigns appealing to more moderate, swing voters who “preferred compromise to confrontation and civil discourse to scorched-earth rhetoric.” He sees the House and Senate “doing serious legislative work” and congressional leaders returning power to the committees, “where members relearned the art of compromise across party lines.” Read more at CNN.com.”
Here’s a variation on the tax credit for voting idea, sort of a carrot with an implied stick.
Joan Walsh explains why Rand Paul’s soulless, insipid response to the Eric Garner tragedy indicates that his presidential campaign will likely tank.
Paul Krugman weighs in on Sen. Schumer’s critique of President Obama’s decision to use his political capital to enact health care reform: “Democrats had their first chance in a generation to do what we should have done three generations ago, and ensure adequate health care for all of our citizens. It would have been incredibly cynical not to have seized that opportunity, and Democrats should be celebrating the fact that they did the right thing…If more Democrats had been willing to defend the best thing they’ve done in decades, rather than run away from their own achievement and implicitly concede that the smears against health reform were right, the politics of the issue might look very different today.”
As a presidential swing state with hot races for governor and U.S. Senate in 2016, North Carolina is likely to get more attention than any other state from both parties and the media, explains Alex Roarty at National Journal.
At Roll Call Alexis Levinson has an insightful explanation of Tom Tillis’s well-played endgame, resulting in his narrow (1.7 percent) victory, despite Kay Hagan’s exceptionally-good U.S. Senate campaign.
Here’s a nifty widget for determining whether you are in red, blue or purple territory at any given moment.

Sen. Chuck Schumer’s argument that Democrats must focus more intensely on addressing the concerns of the working/middle class has received a compelling plug from New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall, who explores the purely political downside of Obamacare in his latest column:

The views of Democratic advocates of Obamacare notwithstanding, public opinion has generally sided with Schumer.
A United Technologies/National Journal Congressional connection poll of 1,013 adults in mid-November 2013 found that by a 25-point margin, 59-34, respondents said that the health care law (which includes a major expansion of Medicaid to cover anyone up to 133 percent of the poverty line, and subsidies for the purchase of private insurance for those between 133 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line) would make things better for the poor. But respondents also said, by a 16-point margin, 49-33, that the law would make things worse for “people like you and your family.” White respondents were even more critical, with 58 percent saying that Obamacare would make things worse for people like you and your family, and 63 percent saying it would make things worse “for the middle class.”
Exit poll data from 1994, after President Clinton’s failed bid to pass health care reform, as well as from 2010 and 2014, provides further support for the Schumer argument. In each of those three midterm elections there were huge white defections from the Democratic Party; in 2010 and 2014, there were comparable defections of senior voters.
The loss of white supporters of House Democratic candidates can be seen in the data. In 1992, white voters split 50-50 between Democratic and Republican House candidates; in 1994, after the Hillarycare debacle, they voted Republican 58-42. By 2010 and 2014, whites voted for Republican House candidates by a 24-point margin, 62-38. The defection of seniors is most striking when comparing exit poll data from 2006 and 2010. In 2006, seniors of all races voted 52-48 for Democratic House candidates; in 2010, they voted 58-42 for Republican House candidates.

Edsall cites Schumer’s call for “an active and committed government that is on your side,” despite current cynicism about government. Schumer and Edsall agree that running away from government is political suicide.
It has been duly noted that Obamacare is, after all, a life-saving reform, which also has the potential for saving middle class taxpayers a huge bundle down the road. Edsall’s article is more about the relatively short-term political liabilities of the ACA. It is a trade-off, and only the passing of time will clarify whether it was a wise political strategy in the long term, as well.
There is an argument, which both Edsall and Schumer have not adequately addressed, that it’s more the weak sell behind Obamacare after enactment that has been destructive to Democratic prospects, rather than the ACA itself. Dems shouldn’t waste too much time playing Monday morning quarterback about the timing of the president’s strategy to enact health care reform. Edsall’s analysis nonetheless lends credence to Schumer’s point that, going forward, Democrats had better get talking, loud and clear, about economic reforms that unequivocally benefit the white working-class, as well as the poor and disadvantaged.
Democrats should be able to match or exceed President Obama’s 36 percent of the white working-class in 2012, with an unflinching focus on supporting reforms like: tax cuts for the middle class, coupled with tax hikes for the very wealthy; prosecuting abusive bankers; a minimum wage hike; strengthening labor union organizing; more federal aid for college students; tax incentives for investing in American jobs; expanding Social Security benefits (and scrapping the payroll tax cap); and an incessant call for infrastructure investments that can put millions of people to work.
Of course the Republicans will refuse to pass any of these reforms. But a laser focus on these issues and a refusal to get distracted will help Democrats rebrand both parties in a way that insures that the GOP will suffer a major rout in 2016.

Former Mayor of Denver Wellington Webb weighs in on where Dems went wrong in the midterm elections: “Unfortunately, we Democrats had little to no respect for, and therefore almost invisible identification with, the accomplishments of President Obama, who had accumulated a litany of successes. We, as Democrats, should have been proud of and owned up to our record of sterling accomplishments from 2008 to 2014: Gasoline prices are down, unemployment is down, health care accessibility is available to all, and, we even justifiably assassinated Osama Bin Laden. Not once, did we mention one Democratic success. This omission was the most shameful outcome of this 2014 election…We ran away from our successes – and Republicans fought against them, even though our efforts improved the lives of Americans. We should have been talking about everything from increasing the minimum wage across the nation, to fighting to protect Medicare and Social Security and providing a national security plan to protect America. But we didn’t. Shame on us Democrats for not amplifying our improvements to the country.”
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has a point here. But a big tent party is going to have its public spats, and right after an election is better than before one.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s “How Obama and the Democrats Can Save Their Agenda” cuts through the GOP’s triumphalist fog with a salient overview: “Now, it will be a Republican Congress vs. a Democratic president. Voters will have a much easier time seeing who stands for what…Obama and progressives should spend the next two years accomplishing as many useful things as they can, blocking regressive actions by Congress, and clarifying the choices facing the nation’s voters. And they’ll get much further by doing all three at once.”
Politico’s Alex Isenstadt takes a look at “The Obama Republicans,” who hold congressional seats in 26 districts President Obama won in 2012, and concludes that the thinning of the vulnerables in the Democratic herd may free up resources to win back a healthy portion of those seats in 2016.
At The Hill Tim Devaney and Lydia Wheeler report on “The GOP’s Strategy to block Obama’s Regs.”
The National Journal’s Alex Roarty probes a much-buzzed question, “Can Clinton Win Back the White Working Class?” and quotes TDS Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira: “Democrats, to win regularly, not just the presidency but other levels of government, they need to do better among … noncollege whites than they’ve been doing,” said Ruy Teixeira, a demographer who has written extensively about the electoral advantages inherent in the nation’s changing demographics. “You can’t … just rely on the coalition of the ascendant…Are they going to convince the majority of these voters that they have a plan and it’ll definitely work?” Teixeira asked. “Well, that’s probably not going to happen. You don’t have to convince most of these voters. You just have to convince a persuadable part of them.”
At The Plum Line Paul Waldman makes a good point, that the future makeup of the Supreme Court is a hugely consequential and substantive issue. Making it a pivotal issue with swing voters will require some creative messaging.
From Paul Rosenberg’s wonky Salon.com post, “Why are these clowns winning? Secrets of the right-wing brain“: “There are things going on in our social and political world that we don’t have names for–and because we don’t have names for them, we can’t think and talk about them coherently. So, we have conservatives on the one hand acting on their mythos, mistakenly believing it’s true as a matter of logos–which is one kind of incompetence–and yet, nonetheless reshaping reality through the power of reflexivity. (Think of how invading Iraq in response to 9/11 helped bring ISIS into existence, for example.) On the other hand, we have liberals seeing things only in terms of logos, who can’t understand how wildly mistaken conservatives can nonetheless reshape the world to reflect their paranoid fantasies, because they’re missing the crucial concept of reflexivity (and even the very concept of missing concepts, the concept of hypocognition)–which is another, very different, but very real form of incompetence.”
What took him so long?

“The states with consistently high turnout tend to make it easy to cast ballots. Maine, Minnesota and Wisconsin allow voters to register on Election Day. Colorado, Oregon and Washington state hold elections exclusively by mail. Washington often has high turnout but was closer to the middle of the pack this year at 41 percent.” — from Associated Press’s Terrence Petty and Jonathan J. Cooper.
Looking at it from other angles, six states, Maine, Wisconsin, Colorado, Alaska, Minnesota and Oregon had voter turnouts of more than 50 percent. Four of the six states, allow election day registration, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Reefer referenda were on the ballot in Alaska, Oregon and a couple of cities in Maine. Dems won races for both Governor and U.S. Senate in OR and MN, Gov in CO and Republicans lost the Gov race in AK. Republicans won the Senate seat in AK and ME and won the WI and ME Gov races.
At TPM Petty and Cooper also credit Oregon’s impressive turnout to “A century-old tradition of civic-mindedness that dates to the Progressive Era, convenient voting procedures and especially contentious races or ballot issues.”
From Ronald Brownstein’s “Shellacking: The Sequel“: “Voter preferences recorded in the Edison Research exit poll posted by CNN virtually reproduced the 2010 outcome. Pending possible small final adjustments, the national exit poll found that Republican House candidates captured 60 percent of whites, 10 percent of African-Americans, and 35 percent of Hispanics; the comparable 2010 numbers were 60 percent, 9 percent, and 38 percent. This year, Republicans won 43 percent of voters under 30, and 57 percent of voters over 65; the 2010 numbers were 42 percent and 59 percent. On Tuesday, 44 percent of voters approved of Obama’s job performance and 55 percent disapproved–exactly replicating 2010.” However, adds Brownstein, “Even if Republicans in 2016 match Tuesday’s dominant three-fifths showing among whites, they will almost certainly lose the White House if they can’t also narrow the Democrats’ traditional presidential-year edge with minorities–who could make up 30 percent of the electorate by then.”
HuffPo Pollster’s Ariel Edwards-Levy and Mark Blumenthal quote David M. Drucker: “Contrary to the many public opinion polls that showed Democrats and Republicans deadlocked heading into Election Day, most internal campaign surveys were correctly forecasting the GOP rout….Properly predicting the correct partisan and demographic turnout model was the difference. Campaigns and party committees got it right, while many, though not all, of the public polls were wrong…This time around, Republicans took seriously the Democrats’ strategy to expand the midterm electorate. In private conversations, Republican strategists working targeted House and Senate races often revealed that their own surveys showed a closer race than what was suggested by the public data….. in the homestretch of the campaign, Republicans started to notice that the voter data scores were revealing a crucial dynamic. The most likely Republican voters were also among the most interested in the upcoming elections, while the most likely Democratic voters were much less interested…”
At Facing South Chris Kromm explains how gerrymandering has eliminated so many southern white Democrats from the House of Representatives.
Republicans can keep spewing outrage about the president’s immigration initiative. But Jonathan Chait has an eloquent response from which Dems can craft their comments: “This is the point of contrast that Obama drew out clearly and effectively. After years of legislative muddle, he was able to detach himself completely from Congress and articulate his own values. His remarks, met with rapt attention in immigrant communities, continued his rhetorical tradition of expanding the American family, accurately presenting himself (and, by extension, his party) as an ally to marginalized Americans. Speaking with evident passion, the president deemed the children of undocumented immigrants “as American as Malia or Sasha.” He cited scripture: “We shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too.” He drew an emotional bond between immigrant communities and the Democratic Party’s ideal of compassion and tolerance. That bond will be his announcement’s most enduring legacy.”
At Campaign for America’s Future, Terrance Heath put it this way: “It’s actually a modest plan, but the beauty part is that Republicans can’t shut it down. Even better, conservatives worried that the president’s move was aimed making them look even crazier by driving their wingnut brethren to go new extremes. Republicans can’t bow to tea party rage without alienating Latinos. The president’s move left the GOP stuck between the voters it still needs now, and the voters it will need in the future — in order to have a future. Ya gotta admit, it’s a pretty slick move.”
One national news outlet pegged her chances of re-election at 12 percent, but Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-1) didn’t just win, reports Abby Livingston at Roll Call. She expanded her margin of victory against the lavishly-funded Republican Speaker of the AZ House. Dems need to study such upset victories.

Among the most popular reforms the public would like to see the new congress address, according to a new NBC News/Wall St. Journal Poll: 82 percent support Congress providing access to lower the costs of student loans; 75 percent support increasing spending on infrastructure, roads and highways; 65 percent support Congress raising the minimum wage; 60 percent support approving emergency funding to deal with Ebola in West Africa; 59 percent support addressing climate change by limiting carbon emissions…So much for the Republican’s midterm ‘mandate.’
Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher makes the case that “Democrats didn’t lose because of Obama,” based on a poll indicating that a plurality (45%) of surveyed voters said the President was not a factor in their vote. Belcher argues further, that data also suggests benching Obama was a bad call.
It’s one thing to get your butt kicked. But you really don’t have to pay for it. Here’s a little smart phone app that identifies Koch brothers products for your supermarket convenience.
Charles Blow gets it mostly right, despite the misleading title of his column on “the solid south.” However, NC, FL and VA had close enough margins in big state-wide races to still be designated as purple states, despite the the midterm bummer.
I guess one of the side lessons of the midterm campaigns is that big-shot endorsements don’t mean much. Bill Clinton didn’t help re-elect Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Sam Nunn and Jimmy Carter didn’t help family members a whole lot in Georgia. But, hey, those are political figures. The real value of celebs in politics is that they help raise money. Still, I’m hoping that Stevie Wonder’s fund-raiser for Mary Landrieu in the Big Easy on Dec. 1 will give her a needed boost, same day as her run-off debate with GOP opponent Bill Cassidy.
So what was the impact of voter i.d. laws on the midterm outcomes? Trip Gabriel and Manny Fernandez have some answers at The New York Times.
2016 game on for former Democratic Sen. Jim Webb.
At Roll Call’s Rothenblog Stu Rothernberg has “Lessons for Democratic Strategists From 2014,” few of them encouraging.
If you haven’t yet seen “Web Therapy,” the over-the-top Showtime Series featuring Lisa Kudrow as Fiona, a manipulative narcissist who peddles three-minute ‘therapy’ sessions to her unfortunate clients, you can also check it out on Netflix. Fiona is married to a mainline lawyer Republican candidate for congress and ‘friend of John McCain’, but the real political fun is the burlesque of the upscale Republican mindset. Nary a soul, even among the characters played by a-list guest stars (Streep, Crystal, Hamm, Paltrow etc.) has a shred of interest in the commonweal, and all are grabbers.