From a DCorps e-blast:
Reason #1 African American turnout surprised everyone. Black voters are now high turnout voters even in off-year elections — we saw this in Virginia last year and James Carville says it will happen in Louisiana this year. There and elsewhere voter suppression is a visible, ugly race-motivated effort to deny African Americans and Latinos the right to vote and they noticed.
Reason #2 Democrats in Senate and Governor’s races ran on economic issues that affected unmarried and working women and these notorious non-presidential year drop-off voters decided the election matters. Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and the House and Senate Democratic leaders have been pressing just such an agenda and Ron Brownstein just spotlighted where they are making the difference in the National Journal. Republican opposition to equal pay for women has been the strongest attack against GOP candidates.
Reason #3 The conservative Republican governing model that swept the states in 2010 is deeply unpopular, and conservative governors are immensely unpopular. We see this in North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Maine.
Reason #4 Latino voters notice that Republicans are running as the anti-immigrant party, and they begin to emulate African Americans who see important reasons to vote. They may notice ads from the RGA that accuse Democrats of favoring welfare for illegal immigrants or that the Republican House voted to rescind President Obama’s executive order on the ‘Dreamers.’
Reason #5 The Republican party brand and Republican Party priorities — both deeply unpopular with voters – mattered more than President Obama in the contested states. The national coverage centered on President Obama, but successful Democratic candidates in the states were using paid media to remind voters each day what today’s GOP really believes.
Read on our website.

All indications are that Democrats are doing a good job in mobilizing African American voters, or rather the African American communities are doing it for themselves. It would be good to see some encouraging indicators that the same is true for the mobilization of Latino voters. All of that taken into consideration, Ronald Brownstein, editorial director of The National Journal, has a compelling article up underscoring the pivotal importance of single, educated white women for Democrats in the midterms: As Brownstein sees it:

…In surveys of both individual Senate races and national preferences on the generic congressional ballot, Democrats are showing stubborn strength with college-educated and single white women.
That performance–combined with preponderant leads among minority voters in almost all surveys–represents the Democrats’ best chance of overcoming gaping deficits with the remainder of the white electorate in the key contests. Yet in a measure of the party’s vulnerability, even that advantage rests on an unsteady foundation: National Pew Research Center and ABC/Washington Post polls conducted in October found that college-educated white women, though strongly preferring Democrats on issues relating to women’s health, actually trust Republicans more on both managing the economy and safeguarding the nation’s security.

Getting down to particular races, Brownstein adds:

On Sunday, the NBC/Marist Poll released results in five hotly competitive Senate races: Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, and Iowa. (NBC and the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion also surveyed South Dakota, but the poll found that Republicans have reestablished a wide lead there.)
In all five of those races, the Democratic (or in the case of Kansas, independent) candidate ran better, usually much better, with college-educated white women than with any of the three other groups of whites.
In the NBC/Marist Polls, Iowa Democratic nominee Bruce Braley led among those well-educated white women by 5 points; Sen. Kay Hagan led by 6 points in North Carolina; Sen. Mark Pryor by 7 points in Arkansas; independent Greg Orman by 21 points in Kansas; and Sen. Mark Udall, who has emphasized social issues probably more than any other Democrat, by a resounding 27 points in Colorado.
The latest University of New Hampshire poll showed Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen holding a commanding 61-percent-to-28-percent advantage over Republican Scott Brown among college-educated white women. Quinnipiac University polls this month in Iowa and Colorado also recorded big advantages for Braley (25 percentage points) and Udall (16 points) with those women. “College-educated white women are Republicans’ biggest hurdle in terms of white voters,” says a top GOP strategist working on independent expenditure campaigns this year. “In those blue states, college white women are the equivalent of minority voters … they are how the Democrats start their base. That’s why you have seen such a focus, particularly in Colorado, with the war on women.”

Brownstein also cites an ABC News/Washington Post poll showing Democrats with a substantially better generic congressional ballot lead with educated white single women voters than was the case in 2010 and even 2012. Dems are going to need this edge to prevail next Tuesday, since they are lagging badly with almost all other groups of white voters. Dems are doing better than they did in those years with less educated white women, but they still lag behind Republicans with this demographic in key battleground statewide races.
If Democratic campaign workers needed an incentive to get extremely busy working the educated single white women demographic, Brownstein has it:

In 2016, a strong performance among the growing populations of minorities and college-educated or single white women might be all Democrats need to hold the White House: Their support allowed Obama to win a relatively comfortable reelection in 2012 despite struggling among most other whites. But maintaining Senate control behind such a narrow coalition is a much stiffer challeng–especially when the road to a majority runs through so many interior states dominated by the older and blue-collar whites hardening in their alienation from the Democratic Party.

As we enter the final week of the midterm campaign, the MSM is talking up a perceived edge for the Republicans in the battle for Senate control, based on some recent polls. But it’s the polls in the last two or three days before the election that have the most cred for predicting the result. For Democrats, however, our best midterm outcome has always been about GOTV in the battleground states — and early voting indications suggest that Dems are in pretty good shape.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Here’s the bottom line: If your idea of leadership is a guy who cries fire in a crowded theater, then vote for the Republican candidate nearest you (or at least most of them) in the November election — and help make Mitch McConnell Senate Majority Leader.
There is an Ebola crisis. It is in West Africa. And it could surely affect people in other areas of the world if the entire international community does not respond to contain it.
It is absolutely in the entire world’s interest to develop treatments for those who become infected, and a vaccine to prevent future epidemics. After all we all live on the same tiny “spaceship earth” where infectious diseases that affect some of us can surely spread to others.
But we do not currently have an “Ebola crisis” in the United States. Those who have fomented panic for their own political gain are engaging in the worst form of demagoguery.
At this moment one person who was infected with Ebola came to this country. Two others have been infected. Forty-three others who lived in close proximity to the original Ebola victim have failed to develop any Ebola symptoms and been cleared from quarantine after the 21-day incubation period elapsed. Others are still being monitored.
To date, Ebola has infected .0000006 percent of the U.S. population of 316 million. It has infected one person in every 158 million. Remember that 36,000 people die annually in the United States from the flu.
At this moment there is no Ebola epidemic in the United States. But some have tried — quite intentionally — to create an epidemic of fear and panic for their own political gain. That is irresponsible and reprehensible.
Many of the Republican Party’s most strident voices — including the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — have absolutely no shame when it comes to exploiting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to sow fear in the United States with the hope of harvesting votes in the November election.
There has been a chorus of inflammatory comments.
Then they proposed cutting off flights from the affected countries to the United States. Of course, since there are no direct flights from these countries, that would involve cutting off connecting flights — mostly from Brussels, Amsterdam and other European cities. As usual, they shot first and aimed later.

Read more…

It’s too late to put any more minimum wage measures on Nov. 4 ballots, but signs are that it’s a good way for Dems to go, looking forward. As Sarah Burnett writes in an AP story:

Looking to motivate younger people, minorities and others in their base to go to the polls on Nov. 4, the party has put questions on the ballot in five states asking voters whether the minimum wage should be increased. The issue is also a near-constant topic on the campaign trail, as Democrats work to identify themselves as stalwarts for the middle class and to paint Republicans — who typically oppose raising the wage because they say it will lead to job cuts — as uncaring.
In one state, Illinois, the campaign to support the minimum wage would not actually raise the wage. The ballot question is non-binding and would only ask voters their opinion.
But for getting out the vote, the issue is “a winner with everybody in our state,” said Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who said he urged party leaders to put it on the ballot. “So encouraging people to vote that issue when it came to the ballot questions, and contrasting Democratic positions with Republican positions, I thought was a worthy issue for this election campaign.”

Burnett notes that Republican candidate for IL Governor of Bruce Rauner “admitted he’d made a mistake after video surfaced of him saying he was “adamantly, adamantly against” increasing the minimum wage,” and now says he supports it. But his Democratic opponent Gov. Quinn’s campaign is playing the “adamantly” video clips repeatedly.
Minimum wage hike questions on the ballot could also help Dem Senate candidates s in Alaska, Arkansas and South Dakota, where Republicans have opposed it. In Nebraska the hope is that it will help Dems win a Republican-held congressional seat.
Burnett adds,

Minimum wage proposals tend to be popular even in conservative states, said John Matsusaka, a University of Southern California economist who studies public ballot issues. All 10 of the statewide measures considered since 2000 have passed, he said…Although ballot initiatives generally increase turnout by about 1 or 2 percent, Matsusaka said, it’s less clear how they affect candidates on the ballot.

In today’s polarized politics across the U.S., with so many close races, anytime Democrats strongly support a hugely popular measure like a minimum wage hike and their opponents oppose it, Dems should try to put it on the ballot wherever it is possible. To do otherwise would be political negligence.
And if Democrats retain majority control of the U.S. Senate it’s quite possible that these minimum wage measures on ballots will have played a pivotal role.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
They’re back. Like the fourth sequel to a bad horror movie, the Republican Right has once again chosen to embrace its long ignoble, hypocritical tradition of pandering to — and stoking — fear.
As the election nears, their ads are filled with images of ISIL terrorists, Ebola viruses, Secret Service breaches, and “porous” borders through which knife-wielding Muslim extremists are surely infiltrating every corner of our society.
It’s not just disgusting. It’s also hypocritical. The fact is that the Republicans have an abysmal record when it comes to defending the security of ordinary Americans.
Last week, the New York Times reported that:
Darkness is enveloping Americans politics.
With four weeks to go before the midterm elections, Republicans have made questions of how safe we are — from disease, terrorism or something unspoken and perhaps more ominous — central in their attacks against Democrats. Their message is decidedly grim: President Obama and the Democratic Party run a government that is so fundamentally broken it cannot offer its people the most basic protection from harm.
But this is nothing new. Right-wing demagogues have perfected their techniques for appealing to our darkest fears for decades. It’s embedded in their DNA.
Who can forget Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950’s who fomented the “red scare” and claimed to “have in his hand a list of Communists” who had infiltrated the government — of General Dwight Eisenhower. McCarthy and his followers cowed many in politics, government, and entertainment with charges that they were “un-American” for years before his tactics so sickened the country that the term “McCarthyism” is now used to denote ” the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence”.
Then there was Sarah Palin, who fabricated the fictitious “death panels” of the Affordable Care Act.
Even the genial George H.W. Bush won election by stooping to the racist demagoguery of the infamous “Willie Horton” commercial.
Last summer, you would have thought that there was an enemy army at our southern border — not 10-year-old refugees from violence in Central America.
And earlier this month, Congressman Duncan Hunter “revealed” that his secret sources had tipped him off that ten ISIL terrorists had been apprehended at the border trying to infiltrate the United States. Turns out that, according to the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol, Hunter’s charge was sheer fabrication based on no evidence whatsoever.
But the thing that really makes this kind of fear mongering so outrageous is the fact that Republicans themselves have such a horrific record keeping Americans safe and secure.
Let us recall that the worst attack on our homeland in American history — 9/11 — occurred after the Bush administration had ignored warnings that Osama Bin Laden was planning an attack. That attack did not happen under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama — it happened under Mr. “War on Terror” George W. Bush.
And let’s also recall that for all his bravado following the attack, the Bush administration failed to apprehend Osama Ben Laden. Barack Obama did.
Of course it was the Bush administration that kicked over the sectarian hornet’s nest in Iraq in the first place, with a completely unnecessary war that was bungled so badly that it created a Sunni power vacuum and created the conditions for the development of ISIL.
And the Iraq War was, itself, the product of precisely the same kind of Republican fear mongering we see today. It was, after all, Saddam Hussein’s non-existent nuclear program that the war was ostensibly launched to destroy.
Remember Condoleezza Rice’s famous line: “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”?
Republican advertisements try to sow insecurity with their disturbing images of Ebola viruses and the fear of an American epidemic. But they don’t mention that it was the GOP that has slashed funding for the Centers for Disease Control — the first line of defense against Ebola and other viral threats to the United States.
And in real dollars, Republican budget cutting has also slashed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 23 percent over the last decade. In fact the NIH Director, Dr. Francis Collins says that if the agency had not gone through a 10-year slide in research support a vaccine for Ebola would be ready today.
The GOP has made much of recent Secret Service security breaches at the White House — without ever noting that their sequester has starved the Secret Service of needed personnel.
The most disgusting GOP ads this cycle are probably the ones that whip up fear of immigrants flooding into America and bringing with them diseases and embedded ISIL terrorists. These amazing ads take all of the ingredients of Republican fear mongering and conflate them into an inflammatory cocktail of fictitious boogeymen. They are all aimed at playing upon the legitimate economic anxiety of ordinary Americans and convincing them that Barack Obama and his Democratic allies are endangering their safety and security.
And, of course, they completely ignore that by every measure the borders of the United States are massively more secure today than they were during the Bush administration.
If you broaden the lens to focus on that underlying economic insecurity, the Republican record gets even worse. It was Republican George W. Bush whose economic policies led to the most catastrophic meltdown of the economy in half a century. When Barack Obama became president the economy was bleeding 800,000 jobs a month. Obama’s stimulus policies, on the other hand, have led to the longest sustained period of private sector jobs growth (55 months) in modern history.
Most middle class Americans — and those aspiring to be middle class — wouldn’t have a clue from their personal lives that America is in fact wealthier per person today than at any other time in history. That’s because those Republican economic and tax policies allowed the top 1 percent of CEOs and Wall Street bankers to siphon off virtually all of the economic growth America has experienced over the last 30 years and left the middle class with stagnating incomes.
The GOP has consistently opposed changing the Bush era tax policies that greatly contributed to the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. And they have fought tooth and nail to stop popular Democratic proposals that would improve the economic security of the middle class and prevent the continued concentration of wealth — like raising the minimum wage, equal pay for women, continued unemployment benefits, asking the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes, and lightening the burden of student loans.
Then there’s retirement security. The Republicans failed plan to privatize Social Security would have eliminated the Social Security guarantee and forced middle class families to rely on the ups and downs of the stock market for their retirement prospects. If your idea of retirement security is a Las Vegas roulette wheel, the GOP is the party for you.
And now they have tried the same thing with Medicare — with a wildly unpopular plan to replace the Medicare guarantee with vouchers for private insurance that would raise out of pocket costs for seniors by several thousand dollars a year. And the Republicans say they are concerned with our “security”?
Let’s not forget Republican fear mongering about the budget deficit. Throughout the Obama presidency, GOP-Tea Party politicians have inveighed against an “exploding deficit” that would surely turn America into an economic basket case. America will go the way of Greece, they claimed.
All of this deficit handwringing has been intended to promote austerity policies intended to allow them to shrink government down so it can be “drowned in a bathtub.” Never mind that those austerity policies have been a disaster in Europe where they have actually been tried.
But once again the GOP has not stopped at fear-mongering. Its deficit hypocrisy has been nothing short of breathtaking. The truth of the matter is that it was the Bush-Cheney regime that left the nation with ballooning deficits as a result of their tax cuts for the rich and spending on the Iraq War. During the Bush years, Cheney was quoted as saying “deficits don’t matter.” So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that as they left office the federal deficit hit a whopping 9.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
And, the Obama stimulus policies that Republicans claimed would explode the deficit have actually shrunk the deficit by over half. It is now anticipated to be only 2.8 percent of GDP in 2014 — lower than its average for the last 40 years of 3.1 percent.
It’s no surprise given this record that the GOP has resorted to fear mongering and demagoguery so often in its history. When you really just represent the interests of the top one or two percent of the population — of the Corporate CEO’s and Wall Street Bankers — it’s hard to convince ordinary Americans that they should entrust you with the leadership of their country unless you can distract them with fear. The GOP offers fear because it cannot offer hope.
Republicans have a horrible record of securing the nation against physical danger and against economic disaster, so to compensate they bluster on and on about the “security and safety” of the American people.
They’re like the sanctimonious televangelist who rails on and on against fornication and ends up getting caught in bed with an underage hooker.
And in the end, history will deal with the demagoguery of Right Wing Republicans like Ted Cruz the same way it dealt with demagoguery of Joe McCarthy. If he’s “lucky” maybe future generations will even label all acts of demagogic, hypocritical fear mongering as “Cruzism.”

Like what you hear and see? Here’s Rick Weiland’s ActBlue page.

We’re starting to see more warnings in various media about the likely consequences of Republicans winning majority control of the U.S. Senate on November 4. It’s not a pretty picture, as a couple of posts TDS has noted (here and here) explain. This Baltimore Sun editorial also does a good job of laying out what it would likely mean:

…It would be a mistake to assume that a Republican-held Senate would not be able to assert its will on public policy in a meaningful way. It might not be able to pass game-changing legislation high on the GOP wish list — a complete dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, for instance — but it might be able to nibble at the edges or put vulnerable Democrats on the spot. In the case of Obamacare, the targets are clear — go after the tax on medical devices, the employer mandate or other unpopular elements in the program. The strategy would be to weaken Obamacare, put it deeply in the red or make it so dysfunctional that eventually a repeal would seem like an act of euthanasia.
And it doesn’t stop there. There are a number of controversial policies that have been bottled up in the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid that would suddenly come to the fore. Expect a lot of attacks on the regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and its Clean Air Act-related rules that seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and on Dodd-Frank restrictions that the Wall Street crowd really despises like executive pay disclosures and the Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks from certain speculative investments…
Think House investigations into the Obama administration have been endless? A GOP Senate would almost certainly join the fray and likely put 2016 Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton in its sights. Political confrontations don’t require 60 votes, just a hearing room and a lot of network cameras. Benghazi and “Fast and Furious” will only be an appetizer…
…Meanwhile, you can be assured that President Obama can forget about meaningful appointments, particularly on the federal bench. Even as a political minority and despite changes in Senate rules, the GOP had succeeded in stalling judicial appointments; now, the wait will be endless — or at least for the remainder of the term.
Republicans will also be able to make inroads in the budget — or at least in the spending bills that take the place of an actual budget — to shape government policy, de-funding Obama initiatives they don’t like much. Legislation will also be offered to score political points (a practice both parties embrace) with an eye toward 2016. But instead of green energy initiatives or immigration reform, as the Democrats pushed, it will now be approval of the Keystone Pipeline or the rejection of curbs on NSA spying or refusing to shut down Guantanamo Bay.

It is a sobering assessment, and it would be good if swing voters would do some serious thinking about it, beyond simply making their choices based on particular candidates in individual races. Party is important, which is something that often gets obscured in the voting booth. Unfortunately, many Americans quickly dismiss party support with assertions along the lines of “I vote the candidate, not the party,” as if they were boldly affirming their individuality.
In reality, however, such voters are merely affirming a shallow understanding of the consequences of political parties in the U.S. They are over-trusting in false equivalence memes about there being no difference between the parties and ignoring the reality that the majority party sets the agenda and runs the committees.
The Sun editorial and similar posts which have recently been published are good antidotes for those who get their political information from print media and the internet. But television still rules with too many voters, so it would be good if more major TV news shows would step up and show the American people why a Republican takeover of congress would further institutionalize gridlock — and worse.

From Kos:
This is a good thing:

Democratic candidates for Congress are crushing their Republican counterparts in small-dollar donations–outraising their GOP foes by an average of more than $100,000 per candidate in the nation’s top races.
That’s the finding of a new National Journal analysis of federal records in the most competitive House contests in the country. In those, the average Democrat has collected $179,300 in donations under $200; the average Republican has brought in only $78,535.
“That,” said Vincent Harris, a Republican digital strategist, “is a big deal.”
It has been widely reported that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has lapped the National Republican Congressional Committee when it comes to small donations. The DCCC has outraised the NRCC by more than $41 million in donations under $200 this cycle, much of it collected online.

I know many of you are frustrated at the amount of email fundraising pitches you’re getting, but THAT’S the reason you are–they work, and they are helping power Democrats past their Republican opponents.
Republicans WISH they could get this kind of popular support, but they’re left begging Sheldon Adelson for another $10 million check. Ours is a people-powered party, theirs is a billionaire-powered one.
And who owns a party? Those who fund it. The more dependent on small-dollar contributions the Democrats become, the more beholden they are to its grassroots. It’s a win-win. We are the majority, and we know better how to win our hearts and minds than the Third Way jokers still holding too much sway.
That’s why it’s important that everyone who hasn’t given this cycle check out this page and find at least one candidate to give $3. At least one.

Paul Krugman’s “In Defense of Obama” at Rolling Stone is getting lots of deserved buzz. Krugman, who was initially skeptical about his policies, now sees an impressive record of accomplishments, despite unprecedented opposition.

…Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn’t deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it’s working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it’s much more effective than you’d think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.

Krugman shrugs off the right-wing opposition Obama has faced as irrational partisanship appropriately enough, and then addresses the criticism from the left:

There’s a different story on the left, where you now find a significant number of critics decrying Obama as, to quote Cornel West, someone who ”posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.” They’re outraged that Wall Street hasn’t been punished, that income inequality remains so high, that ”neoliberal” economic policies are still in place. All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten that agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained even his much more modest efforts. It’s hard to take such claims seriously.

Krugman gives MSM pundits a proper thrashing for mindlessly parroting every report citing the President’s “low approval ratings,” as if it were holy writ. Further, he adds,

…In a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage – Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states – most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn’t what you’d expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down.

Then he provides the reality check about the polls which seems beyond the ken of most pundits: “More important, however, polls – or even elections – are not the measure of a president. High office shouldn’t be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better. Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes.”
He offers some facts to buttress the claim, regarding the Affordable Care Act:

…Multiple independent surveys show a sharp drop in the number of Americans without health insurance, probably around 10 million, a number certain to grow greatly over the next two years as more people realize that the program is available and penalties for failure to sign up increase.
…Obamacare means a huge improvement in the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans – not just better care, but greater financial security. And even those who were already insured have gained both security and freedom, because they now have a guarantee of coverage if they lose or change jobs.
What about the costs? Here, too, the news is better than anyone expected. In 2014, premiums on the insurance policies offered through the Obamacare exchanges were well below those originally projected by the Congressional Budget Office, and the available data indicates a mix of modest increases and actual reductions for 2015 – which is very good in a sector where premiums normally increase five percent or more each year. More broadly, overall health spending has slowed substantially, with the cost-control features of the ACA probably deserving some of the credit.

In sum, “In other words, health reform is looking like a major policy success story. It’s a program that is coming in ahead of schedule – and below budget – costing less, and doing more to reduce overall health costs than even its supporters predicted… with the basic guarantee of adequate coverage not only intact but widened to include Americans of all ages.”
As for the political consequences of Obamacare, Krugman nails the new reality that has pissed off Republicans beyond measure:

And this big improvement in American society is almost surely here to stay. The conservative health care nightmare – the one that led Republicans to go all-out against Bill Clinton’s health plans in 1993 and Obamacare more recently – is that once health care for everyone, or almost everyone, has been put in place, it will be very hard to undo, because too many voters would have a stake in the system. That’s exactly what is happening. Republicans are still going through the motions of attacking Obamacare, but the passion is gone. They’re even offering mealymouthed assurances that people won’t lose their new benefits. By the time Obama leaves office, there will be tens of millions of Americans who have benefited directly from health reform – and that will make it almost impossible to reverse. Health reform has made America a different, better place.

Krugman relates his initial disappointment with Obama’s financial reforms, but concedes:

It’s easy, however, to take this disappointment too far. You often hear Dodd- Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn’t. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there’s a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.
…Unemployment in America rose to a horrifying 10 percent in 2009, but it has come down sharply in the past few years. It’s true that some of the apparent improvement probably reflects discouraged workers dropping out, but there has been substantial real progress. Meanwhile, Europe has had barely any job recovery at all, and unemployment is still in double digits. Compared with our counterparts across the Atlantic, we haven’t done too badly.
Did Obama’s policies contribute to this less-awful performance? Yes, without question. You’d never know it listening to the talking heads, but there’s overwhelming consensus among economists that the Obama stimulus plan helped mitigate the worst of the slump. For example, when a panel of economic experts was asked whether the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus, 82 percent said yes, only two percent said no.
…Obama has done more to limit inequality than he gets credit for. The rich are paying higher taxes, thanks to the partial expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the special taxes on high incomes that help pay for Obamacare; the Congressional Budget Office estimates the average tax rate of the top one percent at 33.6 percent in 2013, up from 28.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the financial aid in Obamacare – expanded Medicaid, subsidies to help lower-income households pay insurance premiums – goes disproportionately to less-well-off Americans. When conservatives accuse Obama of redistributing income, they’re not completely wrong – and liberals should give him credit.

Krugman goes on to credit Obama with groundbreaking leadership in fostering environmental reforms, via executive order — with no good faith compromise provided by GOP members of congress. Renewable energy, fuel efficiency standards, efforts to reducing greenhouse gas emissions have all improved under President Obama, despite Republican roadblocks at every intersection.
With respect to national security concerns, Krugman cites “a huge improvement over what came before and what we would have had if John McCain or Mitt Romney had won. It’s hard to get excited about a policy of not going to war gratuitously, but it’s a big deal compared with the alternative.” In terms of social issues, like women’s rights and same-sex marriage, “We have, in a remarkably short stretch of time, become a notably more tolerant, open-minded nation” under the Obama Administration.
Despite the disappointments of the last six years, concludes Krugman, “This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to…I don’t care about the fact that Obama hasn’t lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot.”
Krugman has made a strong case, not only for Obama’s record, but also for voting against Republicans, who have tried to block his every initiative. His argument should appeal to persuadable voters among his Rolling Stone readers who may have been sitting on the fence. But the last thought they should consider on the morning of November 4 is that not voting is, in reality, a vote to affirm Republican obstruction indefinitely.

If the Dems’ KS gambit wasn’t tricky enough for you, how about a sudden assault on the South Dakota seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Tim Johnson, which the Republicans have been taking for granted as theirs?
Here’s how Alex Altman explains it at Time:

If Democrats hold the Senate in November, it could be due to surprising success in states the party never expected to be competitive.
Just weeks after independent candidate Greg Orman surged in a Kansas Senate race that had been chalked into the Republican column, Democrats have spied another unlikely opening on the prairie. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) on Wednesday pumped $1 million into the surprisingly competitive South Dakota Senate race.
The DSCC poured in the cash just hours after a new poll showed Republican Mike Rounds locked in a three-way contest with independent candidate Larry Pressler and Democrat Rick Weiland. The SurveyUSA poll released Wednesday showed Rounds with 35%, Pressler with 32% and Weiland with 28%. The race also includes a Tea Party candidate who could siphon votes from the GOP frontrunner.

Of course the GOP establishment is making dismissive comments. But rest assured they will be forced to spend lots of the party’s campaign cash and scarce GOTV resources to win the seat. If the polling margins narrow even a little, a muscular ground game could win it for Dems.
As for the reasons behind the Republican candidate’s tumble in the polls, Altman adds:

…Rounds, a former governor, has been dogged by a controversy over the state’s EB-5 program, a federal visa program that grants green cards to wealthy immigrants who invest at least $500,000 in economic development project. As governor, Rounds was a booster of the program, which has drawn criticism for mismanagement and lack of transparency after it was privatized by one of the governor’s allies.

It’s another indication that the Democratic Party is alert and agile, heading into the final month of the midterm campaign. Regardless of the outcome of the midterm elections, no one can fairly say that Democrats were caught napping anywhere in the Senate battlefield.
Ed Kilgore sums up the SD wrinkle at the Washington Monthly:

Now the SUSA poll could be an outlier, and I suspect the NRSC will be sending a lot of emergency help to Rounds while privately cursing him for somehow blowing a huge lead (controversy over Rounds’ support for and his brother’s role in the federal EB-5 visa program, which gives families of foreign investors a big advantage in applying for citizenship, has been a factor in his lagging poll numbers). But you can’t help but wonder what the evening of November 4 will be like if not only we are waiting for the usual insanely slow count from Alaska, and possibly two runoffs (LA and GA), but also not one but two indie senators who may or may not act in concert (and/or with Angus King). That’s some serious uncertainty, folks.

And in a year that was supposed to include a cakewalk Senate takeover for Republicans, more uncertainty cuts into their edge in a big way.