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Goat's POLS nerd thread

Here is the big picture of where we are in this country.
agedistribution1810

Dems can probably squeak out beatingTrump in 2020 without it, but to get the Senate anytime in the next several years they're going to need to peel off 5% or so of older white voters, especially the non-college educated rural whites.

The issue's going to be doing that while keeping the rest of the Dem coalition motivated. If you go too populist you might turn off the suburban voters that flipped the House.
 
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Dems can probably squeak out beatingTrump in 2020 without it, but to get the Senate anytime in the next several years they're going to need to peel off 5% or so of older white voters, especially the non-college educated rural whites.

The issue's going to be doing that while keeping the rest of the Dem coalition motivated.

It is unlikely the Senate is coming back in 2 years. But there are always variables we cannot see. If the Chinese trade war keeps going, farmers will eventually wonder why they are being sacrificed. Of course the trade war could end in a week and that's all off the table.

Coal country is heavily Republican right now, but as we suspected more coal used does not equal more coal miners. Over the last 30 years, the US has lost 100,000 coal mining jobs. Under Trump we have gained back about 2500 and most think it won't grow much more. 2500 out of 100,000 may not be the panacea some saw in Trump.

On the other hand, it may be Trump pushes through a large infrastructure bill and suddenly even more union voters defect over. 2 years is a LONG time to predict what's going to happen given its hard to predict what will happen the morning of an election.
 
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Interesting.

Battleground-state Dems who opposed Kavanaugh all defeated
By Maxim Lott | Fox News


Incumbent Senate Democrats in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination appeared to have paid a price on Election Day, with senators Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Indiana's Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Florida's Bill Nelson all suffering defeat.

In fact, every Democrat incumbent who opposed Kavanaugh in states rated "toss up" by Fox News lost their race. In contrast, the lone Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, won his race.

"Every Dem Senator in a competitive race who voted against Kavanaugh lost," tweeted Tom Bevan, Co-founder of RealClearPolitics. Fox News polling offered evidence the Kavanaugh issue was a major problem for those battleground incumbent Democrats.
 
Huh? They lost most of the state races that they poured money into. Florida, Georgia, Ohio, etc. And Georgia wasn’t even close.
Strike that last comment about Georgia. While it certainly appears that Abrams lost, it was very close.
 
Apparently there's a ton of mail-in ballots left to be counted in Arizona so that race will take a while to figure out who won.

 
Strike that last comment about Georgia. While it certainly appears that Abrams lost, it was very close.
Thank you. I was going to ask you what you were referring to, and my guess is that you posted about Kemp winning big when all of the smaller counties - rural GOP bastions - were in, but the more populous suburban/urban Atlanta area counties were still pending.

Currently Kemp holds a 70,000 vote lead (out of nearly 4 million votes cast) and election officials are still counting . . . Kemp has indicated he thinks his lead is insurmountable, which I suspect is an accurate appraisal even when all absentee and provisional ballots are counted. Abrams is not conceding, and I wouldn't expect her to any time soon. What's really interesting to me is that 538 had Kemp at +1.9% in its last poll prior to yesterday, and that's exactly where the margin currently is, with Kemp at 50.5% and Abrams at 48.4%. (The good news for me in this result is that at least we likely won't be seeing Kemp/Abrams ads for the next two weeks. The bad news is that there will be runoffs - see below - so the political ads will keep on coming for a while . . . .)

Other races of interest in Georgia are the close US House races in the 6th and 7th districts, neither of which is final at this point. Lucy McBath (D) has a 2100 vote lead over Karen Handel (R) currently, with ballot counting and potentially recounting still going on. GA-6 is the suburban Atlanta district that saw the special election last year between Jon Ossoff and Handel, which Handel won in a much closer race than the vacating incumbent - Tom Price - won by in the previous election. Nothing is impossible in this race, but I suspect that McBath will pull of the win here, which is a fascinating result. The district is one of the most highly educated and wealthy districts in Georgia, and has traditionally been a "safe" GOP seat for decades. BTW, the margins for this seat have been GOP +29/32/23 in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and the shift to Democratic in this race was +24 in 2018 (for a +1 margin, so far at least). So it's impossible to tell much about this result in terms of projecting future elections . . . I see it as most likely a highly educated, wealthy suburban district passing a negative judgment on Trumpism . . . who knows whether that will reverse, hold, accelerate or be simply a blip on the electoral radar.

GA-7 is another suburban Atlanta district that is formerly a GOP "safe" area, encompassing most of Gwinnett County. Gwinnett was for a long time the fastest growing county in GA and that growth has changed the demographics and voting patterns dramatically. The GOP candidate is the incumbent, Rob Woodall, and his strategy has been to be as much of a stealth candidate as possible. That left open a possibility for the Democratic candidate, Carolyn Bourdeaux, to brand herself, and she did a pretty decent job of doing so. Currently Woodall has a 3600 vote lead, which is likely enough to project Woodall as a winner.

Other state races are showing much closer than they've been in the recent past: The GOP candidate - an upstart who beat the GOP's "party" candidate in the primary - won Lt. Gov. 52-48% over a pretty good Democratic offering, and both the Secretary of State and an open Public Service Commission races are going to runoffs.

And then I saw this blurb in this morning's AJC:

Abrams also led a surge through Atlanta’s suburbs to carry Cobb and Gwinnett counties – two former GOP bastions that turned blue for the first time in decades in 2016. And she narrowly won Henry County, another suburban county that’s transformed from reliably red to perpetually purple.

Down the ticket, Republicans got clobbered in the suburbs. All three GOP-held seats in DeKalb flipped to Democrats, and powerful incumbents in Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett went down in flames while open seats flipped to young Democratic challengers.

If you want to read the whole, if brief, article, you can find it here: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--reg...s-final-votes-counted/RrCkTLAxPcD93dIS1TQXHL/.

I haven't done any analysis of the local county down ballot results yet, so I can't comment on those, but the general observations above are interesting.
 
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vs the GOP picking up 63 in 2010?

Was a very blah blue night....right on the "average" scale...at best. You look at what could be a GOP landslide in the Senate..... and a lot of big scale Gov races.....

It's basically a turd for the Dems. Only thing worse would have not won the House.

Anyone that argues this was a good night for the Dems is spinning.

While I agree with you about Pelosi (who it looks like is going to fight hard for that Speaker gavel), I disagree about last night. It's fairly on point for what I thought it would be. A few days before the election, I think I posted that the Dems would pick up 30 seats in the House and the Pubs would pick up two seats in the Senate. It looks like it is going to be closer to 40 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate, but basically is trending in the direction I suspected. I think you're making the same mistake some that liberals made leading up to the election - claiming that what they see amounts to more than what it is. You act like a blue tsunami was the expectation when there was nothing like that in the offing. Florida was bad for Democrats, but the rest of the country showed several positive signs.

Maybe if you won back your own political party, you wouldn't be so anxious this stuff. ;):D
 
While I agree with you about Pelosi (who it looks like is going to fight hard for that Speaker gavel), I disagree about last night. It's fairly on point for what I thought it would be. A few days before the election, I think I posted that the Dems would pick up 30 seats in the House and the Pubs would pick up two seats in the Senate. It looks like it is going to be closer to 40 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate, but basically is trending in the direction I suspected. I think you're making the same mistake some that liberals made leading up to the election - claiming that what they see amounts to more than what it is. You act like a blue tsunami was the expectation when there was nothing like that in the offing. Florida was bad for Democrats, but the rest of the country showed several positive signs.

Maybe if you won back your own political party, you wouldn't be so anxious this stuff. ;):D


Yeah you are right. I was probably about 6 gin and tonics deep by that post :D
 
Chuck Todd said the other day they won't start counting those for days, so may be next week before it's called

I'll be shocked if McSally loses there. Arizona's as tough a nut to crack as Texas...maybe tougher.
 
I'll be shocked if McSally loses there. Arizona's as tough a nut to crack as Texas...maybe tougher.

Texas is much redder. The Hispanics in Texas the most conservative Hispanics (all Hispanics) in the country. (Obviously Cuban Americans are the most conservative of any individual ethnic group)
 
Just want to point out about Chicago burbs...there are a LOT of people there...a lot of white, wealthy people.....that trudge into the city on the trains every morning, and return to their $500k-$1m home every night. And every of those districts has gone blue.


Illinois folks got killed by the $10k cap on deducting property/income tax. Chicago burbs have the ugliest property tax I've seen in any place in the nation....and these folks got hit pretty decent.

Just another fracture....

This is just the (negative) Trump effect. Too many fiscal conservatives that don't put up with Trump's antics and behavior.

Once Pritzker's tax hikes hit them on top of any Cook/Lake/Dupage increases, they'll quickly regret dumping Rauner. Do you really think JB is going to change the net exodus from that state?
 
This is just the (negative) Trump effect. Too many fiscal conservatives that don't put up with Trump's antics and behavior.

Once Pritzker's tax hikes hit them on top of any Cook/Lake/Dupage increases, they'll quickly regret dumping Rauner. Do you really think JB is going to change the net exodus from that state?
Can't see anyone regretting dumping Rauner. Pritzker is another billionaire businessman...turns out that he is second only to Bloomberg in wealth. I would project him to be a techocrat type in the mold of Bloomberg or Hickenlooper. We will see though.
 
second only to Bloomberg in wealth

What do you mean by this statement? The difference between Bloomberg and JB ... only one inherited his wealth.

So if you knock Trump for using his father's good start to build his wealth, you'd be even more unimpressed with JB.
 
This is just the (negative) Trump effect. Too many fiscal conservatives that don't put up with Trump's antics and behavior.

Once Pritzker's tax hikes hit them on top of any Cook/Lake/Dupage increases, they'll quickly regret dumping Rauner. Do you really think JB is going to change the net exodus from that state?

There is a rule, and I applied it to Chris Christie as well.

If you can't trusted to take care of your own body to a reasonable extent, you should not be trusted to take care of an entire state.

Iu_att knows nothing about Pritzker. He's not a technocrat at all. He's pretty much admitted he's going to raise taxes on everyone above the middle class, caveat being he wont even tell you the cut off for middle class. Likely that everyone making more than 50K sees an increase like every state that has put in a progressive tax structure.

Just a spoiled loser trying to make a name for himself as a progressive politician by White Knighting for the "poor and downtrodden".

Rauner was put in an impossible position and looked horrible because of it.
 
Just want to point out about Chicago burbs...there are a LOT of people there...a lot of white, wealthy people.....that trudge into the city on the trains every morning, and return to their $500k-$1m home every night. And every of those districts has gone blue.


Illinois folks got killed by the $10k cap on deducting property/income tax. Chicago burbs have the ugliest property tax I've seen in any place in the nation....and these folks got hit pretty decent.

Just another fracture....
So taxes were raised on “rich” Democrats and they don’t like to pay their “fair share.” Hmmm.
 
What in the world happened up in Porter County? Was it their attempt to make Florida look good?

To echo some links above, we may have been hasty Tuesday. 7 governors switched to D, 6 state legislative bodies switched to D, and the Ds will be about +35 in the House. It now looks like the Senate will be -2 D, but could be -1 D. That really is not a bad performance.
 
What in the world happened up in Porter County? Was it their attempt to make Florida look good?

To echo some links above, we may have been hasty Tuesday. 7 governors switched to D, 6 state legislative bodies switched to D, and the Ds will be about +35 in the House. It now looks like the Senate will be -2 D, but could be -1 D. That really is not a bad performance.
I believe Twenty already blamed his original analysis on gin.

It was a good night for the Dems. Not really any better than expected, but what was expected was already pretty solid, and they met expectations, which they haven't always done in recent elections.

At the state government level, the Repubs lost 3 trifectas (lost 4, actually, but picked up Alaska), and the Dems gained 6, which is better than I expected, to be honest. Repub trifecta losses could go up to 4 if Abrams wins in Georgia.
 
The Gingrich legacy.
In 1992, my final election as a Democrat, I thought it was incredibly negative and I thought mostly from the Democratic (my) side, and I very much disapproved. It’s been all negative all the time from both sides since. It’s a bipartisan effort, as Krauthanmer noted.
 
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