evilweasel posted:

The democrats took back the house with a D+8.6 win in 2018.

Xombie posted:

Chances of them doing a "boat rally" are 100%

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Yeah but they need to get the Senate too.

From what I remember they did better than expected in the Senate in 2018 (they were supposed to get utterly creamed by the Repubs initially right due to a really terrible map?) election but they didn't drastically improve their seats like you'd normally expect with a ~8% lead either.

Doing a quick google on wiki looks like they lost 2 seats 2018 in the Senate while they of course got a bunch of seats in the HoR.

I know I've seen several articles which suggest their chances of getting a straight majority in the Senate have improved a fair amount but they also all seem to say its not a sure thing either.

Don't they need something like 53 or 54 seats to actually over come some poo poo heels that have said they won't change the filibuster?

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Don't they need something like 53 or 54 seats to actually over come some poo poo heels that have said they won't change the filibuster?

1337JiveTurkey posted:

2018 was the same class as the 2006 wave that mostly survived 2012. There was very little that was practically winnable. This year is the 2014 class which is much more Republican.

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Don't they need something like 53 or 54 seats to actually over come some poo poo heels that have said they won't change the filibuster?

quote:

You can say, “Oh, you know, the way that political scientists measure racial resentment is a class marker because college-educated people know that they’re not supposed to say politically incorrect things.” But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level, was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important fact of the world.

I think people take the wrong conclusions from it. The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016 election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.

quote:

Yeah. One thing I’ve learned from working in Democratic politics for eight years is that the idea that the limiting factor on what moves policy to the left in this country is the personal decisions of individual Democrats is kind of crazy. Democratic politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really want to win.

In my career, I have seen circumstances where polling has said to do one thing, and then we didn’t do it for ideological reasons. But every single one of those times, we ignored the polling from the left. Like, if Joe Biden wanted to just follow the polls, he should support the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funding for abortion services). The Hyde Amendment polls extremely well. But the people who work on his campaign oppose the Hyde Amendment. So Joe Biden opposes the Hyde Amendment.

Like, if you look at the Obama administration, the first time they resorted to procedural radicalism was to make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. They didn’t do that to win votes; a lot of labor’s agenda — repealing right-to-work laws, establishing sectoral bargaining — is unpopular. But Democrats do pro-labor policies because the people who work on Democratic campaigns, and who run for office as Democrats, are generally very liberal people. Leftists just don’t understand how small of a minority we are.

Xombie posted:

"We'll get it right the second time!" - A winning campaign slogan.

Inferior Third Season posted:

At least his promise that the wall will be built and Mexico will pay for it is much more plausible this time around.

Djarum posted:

https://twitter.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1284267712114569216?s=20

Maybe the boat thing has legs?

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

Trump won Alaaka by 15 points

Seven Hundred Bee posted:

a great interview with david shor got posted today about electoral strategy that I think would be great for this thread: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/202...w&utm_medium=s1

a few quotes that stood out to me:

Inferior Third Season posted:

At least his promise that the wall will be built and Mexico will pay for it is much more plausible this time around.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Trumps new campaign manager everyone

https://twitter.com/Stepien_Bill/status/1284267312552357888

It’s currently 90-10 Biden

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Trumps new campaign manager everyone

https://twitter.com/Stepien_Bill/status/1284267312552357888

It’s currently 90-10 Biden

Somfin posted:

That wall's getting built no matter who wins, Biden's said as much

Mellow Seas posted:

Pretty sure it was just a dad joke about the US being in shambles, but thank you for taking the opportunity to remind us that Dems bad.

Seven Hundred Bee posted:

a great interview with david shor got posted today about electoral strategy that I think would be great for this thread: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/202...w&utm_medium=s1

a few quotes that stood out to me:

quote:

Like, if you look at the Obama administration, the first time they resorted to procedural radicalism was to make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. They didn’t do that to win votes; a lot of labor’s agenda — repealing right-to-work laws, establishing sectoral bargaining — is unpopular. But Democrats do pro-labor policies because the people who work on Democratic campaigns, and who run for office as Democrats, are generally very liberal people. Leftists just don’t understand how small of a minority we are.

Ego-bot posted:

Citation needed big time on the bolded part here. Missouri, a state Trump won by 19 points, struck down right-to-work during a mid-term year by 35 points. Republicans even moved it to late summer so it would be more likely to pass.

Pro-labour policies are unpopular: This opinion brought to you courtesy of a Democratic Party consultant.

quote:

In a poll of 600 likely Virginia voters conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, 68 percent of respondents said they support the state’s right-to-work laws. This includes a majority from both major parties: 81 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of Democrats. Seventy-four percent of independents also supported keeping these protections.

Ego-bot posted:

Citation needed big time on the bolded part here. Missouri, a state Trump won by 19 points, struck down right-to-work during a mid-term year by 35 points. Republicans even moved it to late summer so it would be more likely to pass.

Pro-labour policies are unpopular: This opinion brought to you courtesy of a Democratic Party consultant.

quote:

In a poll of 600 likely Virginia voters conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, 68 percent of respondents said they support the state’s right-to-work laws. This includes a majority from both major parties: 81 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of Democrats. Seventy-four percent of independents also supported keeping these protections.

quote:

Americans for Prosperity, founded in 2004, is a libertarian/conservative political advocacy group in the United States funded by David Koch and Charles Koch. As the Koch brothers' primary political advocacy group, it is one of the most influential American conservative organizations.

quote:

But that’s not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved.

quote:

If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions, health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of people.

And the reason is that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues, they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones

quote:

It’s true that political parties have enormous control over the views of their partisans. There’s like 20 percent of the electorate that trusts Democratic elites tremendously. And they will turn their views on a dime if the party tells them to. So this is how you can get Abolish ICE to go from a 10 percent issue to a 30 percent issue.

If you’re an ideological activist, that’s a powerful force. If you convince strong partisans to adopt your view, then when the party comes to power, strong partisans will ultimately make up that administration and then you can make policy progress.

The problem is that swing voters don’t trust either party. So if you get Democrats to embrace Abolish ICE, that won’t get moderate-ish, racist white people to support it; it will just turn them into Republicans.

quote:

It’s true that, if you are a representative in a swing district, you have a strong incentive to raise lots of money. But I think those incentives mostly pull candidates left, for the simple reason that the way that you get a lot of small-dollar donations is to stand up and yell at Trump — or do whatever makes very liberal dentists and doctors excited. Obviously, that doesn’t mean calling for socialism. But these liberal professionals do tend to be pretty economically left wing.

quote:

David Broockman showed in a recent paper — and I’ve seen this in internal data — that people who give money to Democrats are more economically left wing than Democrats overall. And the more money people give, the more economically left wing they are. These are obviously the non-transactional donors. But people underestimate the extent to which the non-transactional money is now all of the money. This wasn’t true ten years ago.

So then you get to the question: Why do so many moderate Democrats vote for center-right policies that don’t even poll well? Why did Heidi Heitkamp vote to deregulate banks in 2018, when the median voter in North Dakota doesn’t want looser regulations on banks? But the thing is, while that median voter doesn’t want to deregulate banks, that voter doesn’t want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the North Dakota business community signals that it doesn’t like Heidi Heitkamp, that’s really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural power.

I think that’s a very straightforward, almost Marxist view of power: Rich people have disproportionate cultural influence. So business does pull the party right. But it does so more through the mechanism of using its cultural power to influence public opinion, not through donations to campaigns.

quote:

By contrast, Democratic donors are much more liberal than Democratic citizens on social issues, whereas their views are more similar on economic issues. Both parties’ donors, but especially Democratic donors, are more pro-globalism than their citizen counterparts.

quote:

Yeah. One thing I’ve learned from working in Democratic politics for eight years is that the idea that the limiting factor on what moves policy to the left in this country is the personal decisions of individual Democrats is kind of crazy. Democratic politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really want to win.

In my career, I have seen circumstances where polling has said to do one thing, and then we didn’t do it for ideological reasons. But every single one of those times, we ignored the polling from the left

quote:

The experiment focuses on whether contributions facilitate access to influential policy makers. In the experiment, a political organization attempted to schedule meetings between 191 congressional offices and the organization's members in their districts who were campaign donors. However, the organization randomly assigned whether it revealed to congressional offices that prospective attendees had contributed to campaigns. When informed prospective attendees were political donors, senior policy makers made themselves available between three and four times more often.

Rigel posted:

Its kind of understood that "Right to Work" laws are very popular. There are a large chunk of voters who both support them while also vaguely supporting unions in a general sense at the same time. When they hear of a law saying no one can be forced into a union or forced to pay union dues to keep their job, they vote for it. Every time it gets on the ballot outside of dark blue states, it polls well and often wins without a highly organized and sophisticated opposition.

Opposing those laws is a difficult argument to make with a sound bite. The side fighting for the right to work law needs less effort, intelligence, or money to get their message across.

joepinetree posted:

It literally was defeated by referendum in MO in 2018.

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

VitalSigns posted:

Isn't that just because the name "right-to-work" is ridiculously misleading

Like, it's been voted down in actual referenda even in Republican states once unions have a chance to explain that it has nothing to do with a right to work

Pick posted:

I'm sorry to see we won't see any more of Lewis in this race or his continuing endorsement.