Fox, CNN and now even MSNBC has called it.
Done.
It looks like the Senate is a long shot, but the 60 seats called on Fox News now looks quite conservative.
More comments after I wake up, sometime after noon tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The Narcissist-in-Chief: Strategy sessions were all about Teh One
According to the report, party leaders wanted Obama to reconfigure his inner circle, even going so far as to fire some of his key staff members, after several strategy sessions failed to produce a consensus on strategy they could use to minimize some of the catastrophic losses that Democrats will almost certainly suffer tonight.
From the story:
Tensions have come to the surface after meetings over the past few weeks in which Obama senior adviser David Axelrod discussed communications strategy with senior Democratic strategists and party officials. Some Democrats were so unhappy with the White House meetings, they started their own.
The strategy sessions aired a range of disagreements over how to help Democrats forestall an electoral drubbing at the polls—a defeat party strategists believe could have been minimized with a different White House playbook.
Among the complaints: Mr. Obama conveyed an incoherent message that didn't express what Democrats would do over the next two years if they retain power; he focused more on his own image than helping Democratic candidates; and the White House picked the wrong battle when it attacked Republicans for using "outside" money to pay for campaigns, an issue disconnected from voters' real-world anxieties.
…
"The money thing could work, but there's never been a larger frame around it to connect it to people's lives," said Dee Dee Myers, a consultant who worked for the Clinton White House when Republicans swept the 1994 elections. She said she participated in an Oct. 8 meeting with Mr. Axelrod and about 15 Democratic strategists at the White House.
A White House official defended the Obama Team's strategy. The pushback against the flood of advertising from outside conservative groups was vital, he said. "Candidates were being pummeled by those ads. Unless we raised the issue of who was paying for it all, they were going to get swallowed alive."
Would it have mattered if the Obama White House had agreed with Party and Congressional leaders on a consensus theme for defending themselves against a coordinated, nationalized Republican assault? Perhaps. But the Narcissist-in-Chief was hearing none of the larger party complaints. While the election is indeed a referendum on the policies that they had jointly agreed to press forward, El Presidente appears to have been more interested in defending his own brand, rather than the Democrat brand.
They started on this great progressive journey together. Two years and an aggressive legislative agenda completed, and now it’s time to work together to defend their record and describe precisely what policies they would pursue together. What does the Narcissist-in-chief do? He balks. “You’re on your own,” he seems to have told them.
Despite the fact that anywhere from 50 to 70 of “them” will lose their jobs tonight for sticking their neck out and voting with the Party leadership; and despite apparent pleas from Party and Hill Democrat leaders to help craft a common message that might help reduce some of those losses, they’re done. The faithful have outlived their usefulness and they’re getting thrown under the bus.
Tonight, the most oft-gored ox will be the conservative Blue Dog caucus. Conservative District after Conservative District is likely to turn Crimson Red. And the message being sent to ordinary Democrats is that the far-left leadership of the party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you. That’s why it was so important for people to go to the polls and turn ALL Democrats out, which would force the good guys in the party to clean house and return the party to its mainstream base.
The left does not rule this country. The center-right does. Centrist Democrats and right-leaning Republicans can work together on common sense ideas that will restore the fiscal health of our great nation, and get it back on the path it’s supposed to be on.
The Narcissist-in-Chief isn’t willing to work with you on that, but we are.
Beware “leaked” exit polls
Edison Research, the largest and most widely used company for conducting exit polls during US federal elections, is conducting research in 26 states today. Per a contact of mine at the Mobile Press-Register, all exit polling data will be quarantined until 4:30 CDT. None of the races in Alabama or Mississippi are being sampled according to my source, but the Florida Senate and Governor races are, as is the Senate Race in Louisiana.
The Louisiana decision is odd, as David Vitter will almost certainly cruise to reelection, while the Alabama Governor’s race, the AL-02 Congressional race and the MS-04 Congressional race would be interesting.
Exit polls have not been as good at predicting a race’s outcome as they have been in understanding why a particular candidate won or lost (more on that, below). They’re supposed to show trends among demographic groups. The breakdown in using exit polling as a predictor is that those trends may or may not be representative of the overall electorate, introducing bias. Furthermore, those trends don’t always reflect turnout. An exit poll may breathlessly report that white protestant females are breaking 75-25 for Candidate A, but not tell you that the white female Catholics voted in much larger numbers.
The real point of this post—if you hear anything about leaked exit polls, dismiss it out of hand. Exit polling data is almost never leaked now, and those with alleged inside information about what the polling data contains are talking because they have an agenda, and its never an agenda that favors our side. In the 2000 election, there were “sources” floating around exit polling data from several states showing Al Gore with big leads among key demographics. The data were floated by political operatives attempting to suppress GOP turnout in afternoon voting. Some think it may have worked. And don’t forget that Edison’s own exit polling data predicted that John Kerry had defeated George W. Bush in 2004.
Even though I do have a good source at the paper, I won’t get any exit polling data until you see it on one of the major networks, and even then there might be an agenda behind the discussion. And, even if there is no agenda, the data are likely to be as useless as they were six years ago.
Final Gallup Poll: “Get a paddle.”
There’s a little good news in there for Democrats. They’re also expected to get some fairly good turnout numbers. Second best at 44% but well behind their numbers from 2006, when they peaked at 53%. But that’s where the good news stops, ladies and gentlemen.
The record level of overall enthusiasm is primarily the result of Republicans’ heightened excitement — 63% of Republicans (including Republican-leaning independents) say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting. That not only greatly exceeds Democrats’ expressed enthusiasm this year, but also is substantially higher than what Gallup has measured for either party’s supporters on the eve of a midterm election.
The high level of Republican enthusiasm has led to the largest gap in enthusiasm by party of any recent midterm elections, 19 percentage points. The prior highs were nine points in favor of the Democrats in 2006, and nine points in favor of the Republicans in 1994.
…
The party with the advantage in enthusiasm has won the greater share of the national congressional vote, and gained seats in the House, each election year since Gallup began tracking voter enthusiasm in 1994.
Here’s a snapshot of the “enthusiasm gap” as measured by Gallup in the last five midterm elections. Nineteen points is unprecedented. It would be a mistake to try to correlate the enthusiasm gaps measured versus the number of seats that swung in each election, and then use the correlation to predict the landscape come tomorrow morning. Why? Because the 2010 numbers are off the charts.
The White House has announced a 1:00 pm EDT news conference tomorrow. No word yet if John Boehner will attend, or if he’ll have a short, flat wooden object in his hands.
“Because, BUSH!” DNC already in spin mode over election losses
In the Election Day 2010 talking points email sent to its media shills and other assorted allies today, they can’t even get out of the first paragraph before frothing at the mouth and blaming “BOOSH!”
Democrats knew that 2010 would be an uphill battle for three reasons: 1) the party of the President historically loses seats in midterm elections; 2) too many people are looking for work or struggling to get by as a result of 8 years of irresponsible economic policies (and despite creating more private sector jobs in the last 8 months than President Bush did in 8 years); and 3) the sheer number of seats we're defending this year as a result of the successes of 2006 and 2008, including 49 Democratic Representatives on the ballot this year whose districts John McCain won in 2008.
But as a result of the hard work of the President, Democratic campaigns, the DNC, OFA, coordinated campaigns, campaign committees, and committed Democratic volunteers, our candidates are more competitive today than in previous comparative mid-term elections and in the best position possible for success.
The stupidity of blaming Bush for a historic election ass-kicking is breathtaking. Not only is Bush now more popular than Obama in opinion surveys, he’s likely to return to the campaign trail in 2012 to raise money and stump for Republican hopefuls in that election.
But more comical is the second paragraph. The only comparable midterm elections were 1938, 1946 and 1994. There are some statistical analyses showing that the 2010 midterm could be even more historic and destroy some long-held beliefs about generic ballot polling, turnout and how it translates into seats won/lost.
It boggles the mind that a reasonably cognizant spokesperson could utter that second paragraph with a straight face.
The real truth that Democrats are going to have to face is that despite spending trillions in stimulus money, taking over the automobile, health care and financial services industry, alienating our allies while emboldening our enemies and speaking down to the American people as if they were so many peasants on the plantation, the electorate is poised to rise up and smite the beast like the fist of an angry God.
No amount of spin can change that.
Election Day 2010: What it’s about, and making it happen
By now you’ve heard a few dozen different theories on what this election is about. I’ll break it down for you, but I’m going to use the words of a very famous Constitutional scholar:
“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress…. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.”
Sound familar? Those are comments made by the primary author of the Constitution, James Madison. He said this during a debate about a bill being considered to subsidize cod fisherman. Apparently, some politician was arguing that this subsidy would fall under the General Welfare clause and Madison objected to the use of that language to justify the measure. In doing so he objected to the very Federal Government we have today.
THIS is what the election is about. The current administration has taken an already out of control government and put it in overdrive. Towards the end of the Bush administration, the American public was beginning to get fed up with this situation. When Obama started enacting his agenda, the Progressive agenda, the Big Government Statism that Madison objected to a couple hundred years ago, the American people were motivated to action.
Seriously, go read the whole thing. RB breaks it down and lays it out for you. This election is one step towards reversing decades of the same kind of progressive growth in government that Madison was warning us against.
On October 22nd, I wrote this post about voting a straight ticket. That’s just what I did just moments before writing this post. It was the first time in 16 years that I’ve voted straight ticket, and only the second time in a voting history that I started in 1980. I implore you to do the same thing. Don’t let even the “good guys” in the Democrat Party get back into office until they clean their own house and return their party to the mainstream it was in the decades after World War II. That’s not the party of Harry S. Truman or Jack Kennedy anymore. That’s the party of Karl Marx and Eugene Debs.
Democrats need to be taught a stern lesson, and RB’s post beautifully explains why. The center-right majority that rules this country needs to rise up today in ways that destroys the media narrative. We’re not angry. We’re not frustrated. We’re not scared. We’re not stupid. We’re not peasants. We’re determined to take the first step towards getting our country back. And the best way to do that is to make the Democrats take their party back.
And if you haven’t already, go make the Crimson Red Tsunami happen.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Two “Blue Dog” Districts that are almost certain to flip
I’ve talked about and linked to Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight blog about 373,384,288 times during this election cycle. I’ve also mentioned two key, southern Blue Dog Districts several times. Those are MS-04, where conservative Democrat Gene Taylor is locked in a dogfight with Steven Palazzo; and AL-02, where conservative Democrat and former Montgomery mayor is locked in a battle with former Montgomery city council member Martha Roby.
As of tonight, Election Eve, Silver has both races flipping to the Republicans.
Click this link for his forecast for MS-04.
Click this link for his forecast for AL-02.
Early in this cycle, both of these seats looked like safe holds for the Democrats. Congressional Quarterly had them both reliably blue. But Taylor’s support has eroded quickly in the face of a fierce media campaign by Palazzo and Martha Roby’s been getting tremendous Tea Party and national GOP support.
As of the opening of polls tomorrow morning, it looks like they’re both going Crimson Red.
The Bwahaha Report: Ryan Seacrest to get Obama interview
Two years ago, the legacy media hyped the incoming Barack Obama administration as “historic.” I don’t think they had in mind that he would go down as a historic embarrassment.
On the eve of what is now certain to be a historic midterm election, the self-aggrandizer in chief will be interviewed by American Idol’s Ryan Seacrest. How much more embarrassing can it get?
Sam Stein notes that American Idol's Ryan Seacrest, who hosts a radio show in Los Angeles, is getting an exclusive Obama interview tonight, part of the president's tour of the base.
Seacrest asked his Facebook fans for suggested questions, and their responses include:
Whats his Favorite Song from October ?
What do you think of Justin Bieber???
Can you say "Nasi Goreng" in Indonesian please..
I'm only 13 butt ........ Can we change the world together ? Can my children see the beautiful nature one day ?
Do you watch Hawaii Five 0?
To be fair, MTV's "town hall," derided in advance, produced some pretty tough questions.
Will he make a guest appearance on South Park? Get a cameo appearance on Desperate Housewives?
When asked to comment about the announcement by Fox’s Megyn Kelly, former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said, and I’m paraphrasing: “I would really like to be able to laugh with the President, but more and more we’re laughing at the President.”
At least Dana’s boss emeritus knew and respected the dignity of the office he held. This idiot trashes it.
“We don’t call them ‘enemies.’ We call them ‘patriots.’” UPDATED
Scroll down for an update.
John Boehner is going after Obama in a closing argument aimed at making sure this election is a nationalized referendum on the President’s politics. At a rally tonight in Cincinnati, Ohio the man who will replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House will remind the nation that this election is about complete repudiation of Obama’s divisive, arrogant and hyperpartisan rhetoric. As reported on America’s Newsroom on Fox News and in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, Boehner released an advance copy of the remarks he’ll give tonight.
“We have a president in the White House who referred to Americans who disagree with him as ‘our enemies.’ Think about that. He actually used that word. When Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used the word ‘enemy,’ they reserved it for global terrorists and foreign dictators – enemies of the United States.”
“Sadly, we have [a] president who used the word ‘enemy’ for fellow Americans…fellow citizens. He uses it for people who disagree with his agenda for bigger government…people speaking out for a smaller, more accountable government.”
“Mr. President, there’s a word for people who have the audacity to speak up in defense of freedom, the Constitution and the values of limited government that made our country great. We don’t call them ‘enemies.’ We call them ‘patriots.’”
Preach it!
Fired up rhetoric like this doesn’t make much of an impact this late in the game. But it does fire up the base, demoralize the opposition base and perhaps push a few of the dunderheads who haven’t yet made up their minds.
But it also shows that the GOP leadership is listening to its base. The “enemies” comments got little criticism in the mainstream, legacy media. Most of the scorn and outrage came from blogs, talk radio and social media. The GOP has long been derided for not having its finger on our pulse. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons they lost their way after the 2004 election and got “fired” in 2006 and 2008. If they really are listening then it’s a wonderful thing.
We have a lot to say, Mr. Speaker. And yes, we are Patriots.
UPDATE: Via Politico, Obama is now trying to un-ring the bell.
In Monday’s radio interview with Michael Baisden, Obama said: “I had a conversation with a Hispanic radio outlet, Univision, and during the course of that conversation, one of the things that I had to say to the Latino community, which is frustrated that we haven't seen progress on immigration reform, was that they can't sit out of this election. There were arguments being made that because Democrats hadn’t gotten this done, that Latinos should vote against Democrats or just sit out the election.
“And I said, well, you can't punish your friends when — the folks who’ve been supporting it. Now, I did also say if you're going to punish somebody, punish your enemies, and I probably should have used the word ‘opponents’ instead of ‘enemies.’ Now the Republicans are saying that I'm calling them enemies. What I'm saying is you’re an opponent of this particular provision, comprehensive immigration reform, which is something very different.”
Umm, no. Sorry. No do overs. He let the truth of his attitude show in the first interview with Univision. Conservatives, in his sick little mind, are his enemies and they must be punished. Now that the mask has slipped and he learns that the soon-to-be Speaker of the House is going to hoist him with his own petard, he’s out there with another media outlet trying to walk it back.
This is the same thing as a racist saying he really didn’t mean to use the “N” word. Or, the same as Jesse Jackson saying he really didn’t mean to refer to New York as “Hymie Town.” You don’t get to un-ring the bell.
Can we party like it’s 1773 yet?
Gallup’s final look at the generic Congressional ballot shows an “unprecedented” gap in enthusiasm. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight notes that damned near every polling outfit—even the ones that don’t like showing a lean to the GOP—are showing a strong lean towards the GOP.
It should be noted, however, that this year's 15-point gap in favor of the Republican candidates among likely voters is unprecedented in Gallup polling and could result in the largest Republican margin in House voting in several generations. This means that seat projections have moved into uncharted territory, in which past relationships between the national two-party vote and the number of seats won may not be maintained.
Additionally, efforts by state legislatures in recent years have attempted to insulate incumbent members of Congress from strong partisan tides such as are in force this year. Congressional district lines have been drawn to make them safe for specific parties, which may reduce the impact of national trends on election outcomes.
Fox News, whose models haven’t had a Republican lean in the past but have something of one this year, has Republicans up 13. CNN has them up 10. Rasmussen, up 9. YouGov, plus 8.
The CBS/New York Times poll has them up 6, as does the survey from Pew Research, as does an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that asks voters which party they’d prefer to see control Congress (not technically a generic ballot poll, but the questions usually produce similar results.)
…
Nevertheless, if a simple formula and a complex one tell you the same thing — yeah, Tuesday’s probably going to be a really good night for Republicans, but we really don’t have a very good idea of exactly how good — it’s probably time to embrace that conclusion. This is a really strange election, or at least one that pollsters are having an awfully difficult time getting a handle on. To claim you can predict Republican gains within a range of 5 or 10 seats isn’t science — it’s superstition.
When it comes to the science of forecasting elections, pay attention to Silver. The dude works for the worst of the worstly biased media outlets in the history of modern journalism, but he sticks to the numbers and the numbers give the Democrats about a one-in-six chance of holding power in the House.
In the Hot Air Green Room, Patrick Ishmael has a seat-by-seat cheat sheet that you can print and use to keep up with how far the wave washes inland.
But please, make sure you vote before you start to party, Ok? And make sure everyone around you votes, and have them make sure everyone around them votes, too.
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