November Election Thread

[_Water Dog]

Responding to EA's comment from another thread. Seemed more appropriate over here.

Democrats are chugging along towards a historic landslide right now. It's an odd time to talk about why they are such losers.

Really?

CNBC All-America Economic Survey shows no big blue wave in November 3 Hours Ago | 00:52 With economic optimism soaring in the country, will Democrats be able to sweep to power in either house of Congress or will buoyant sentiment help Republicans keep hold of their Congressional majorities?
The latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey offers mixed signals, but leans against a wave Democratic election like that those that swept Republicans to power in 2010 and 2014.

The poll of 800 Americans across the country, with a margin of error of 3.5 percent, found a six-point Democratic lead on the question of who voters will choose in the November congressional elections. The 42 percent to 36 percent margin is not far from what pollsters would expect given the greater percentage of Democratic registered voters.

"A six point differential is not something that's going to cause a big electoral wave," said Micah Roberts, the Republican pollster on the CNBC poll, a partner Public Opinion Strategies. "Economic confidence that people have among a lot of groups is providing a buffer" for Republicans.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/15/mixed-s ... r=sharebar

And while an ABC poll finds a nine point Democrat lead in the generic congressional poll, 53-42, in the sixty-six districts that are actually competitive, that actually are in play, Republicans lead those by a single point, 47-46.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/note-po ... d=58495577

How is this a landslide? We'll see what actually happens. But even if Ds take the house, that in of itself isn't a "landslide" feat. Democrats have an inherent numbers advantage. And post presidential election swings in Congress are normal. So normal, if Ds don't take both chambers back, that's a bad sign for you. If you don't even take the house back, a very bad sign.

A landslide is what happened in 16. Defying all forecasts. Barely taking the house back ain't a landslide, buddy.

Perhaps a review of history is in order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political ... _over_time

Democrats, historically, have controlled Congress. It's pretty interesting to review this history. For the vast majority of the 20th century to present day, the Democrats ran Congress. Not only ran it, but with huge margins. A particular long streak from 1930s until late 1990s. What happened? Bill Clinton is what happened. He turned people off in a big way, it swung back to GOP for the first time since forever. And then Bush's stupid wars turned people off again, so it swung back to Democrats and then Obama. But then Obama was a disaster too. He didn't have Bill's baggage, a generally likable fellow, but he was profoundly incompetent, back to GOP again for the second time.

Democrats have all the advantages. Numbers advantage. Home field advantage. Emotional appeal. But over and over and over again they keep screwing themselves. The story of the past 30 years is a story of democrats going off the rails. Bill Clinton completely screws things up. Instead of throwing him under the bus, what do you do? You crown his wife in the senate, you crown his wife as the SOS. And then you hand her the nomination as if its her birthright. Looking back, the whole thing is quite comical.

Now you're getting beat by a bad combover guy calling people "horseface" on Twitter. ROFL. Why's he popular? Not because he's some constitutional savant, but simply because he's the guy that was willing to voice what so many have been thinking for a long time and point out all the ridiculous crap you guys do. That's it. You want to beat Trump, just stop doing ridiculous crap. You guys should be the ones making fun of the Elizabeth Warrens.

[_Water Dog]

The significant level of Hispanic support for Republicans, including President Trump, seems to be what most vexes Democrats, progressive activists, and much of the establishment media (if I may repeat myself). The left resists the reality that Hispanics are a diverse lot. Hispanics in Texas are not Hispanics in California are not Hispanics in New York are not Hispanics in Florida.

Moreover, even when lumped together, Hispanics care more about education, terrorism, the economy, and health-care costs than they do immigration. Hispanics simply do not fit the monolithic Democratic or media-projected stereotype. Rather than face this forthrightly, left-leaning media suggests the real problem is that Hispanics are lazy and apathetic.

Perhaps the real problem is that the Democratic Party, its satellite constituency groups, and the overwhelming majority of reporters and pundits in Big Media reflect the interests of progressive activists at the expense of their coalitions, both nationally and locally.

For example, the report found that 80 percent of Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” This view is shared by 87 percent of Hispanics, 88 percent of American Indians, 82 percent of Asians, 75 percent of African-Americans, and 79 percent of Americans under age 24. Yet only 30 percent of progressive activists think political correctness is a problem. If that gap seems odd, it is explained by the fact that progressive activists are the least racially diverse group, except for the most devotedly conservative 6 percent of Americans.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/17/bet ... nt-voters/

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I have this theory. It's my general observation that leftists in Utah are way more fanatical, on the average, than leftists in other places. It has something to do with the exmo phenomena. Raised with the persecution complex, a form of victimhood culture, and then all this is compounded through the process of ostracization that pairs with disaffection from the church. And much like politics, a lot of the people who disaffect do so not for intellectual but emotional reasons. They were already the one that couldn't get along. And now they find themselves in a minority position, where they feel they have been victimized in every way imaginable by the culture that surrounds them. They feel powerless. This sort of intense lash out is what you get.

This is a pretty good observation. My wife and I have discussed this a few times, and the counterculture is the way it is probably because of the Mormon bubble here, and outside of the Utah the internal Mormon bubble, I suppose. But there's something else going on, a visceral anger and borderline mental illness with the way the ex-Mormon Left here and elsewhere overreacts to virtually everything political. You don't see this kind of crazy in the deep South where religion is just as if not more pervasive than here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I suspect the same all or nothing mindset of TBMs gets transferred to politics when a faithful type leaves the the Church.

Perhaps when they become Atheist or Agnostic they feel like the only real truth, real power, and real difference to be had is through the political process so they throw themselves into that with the same fervor they threw themselves into Mormonism.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

CNBC All-America Economic Survey shows no big blue wave in November 3 Hours Ago | 00:52 With economic optimism soaring in the country, will Democrats be able to sweep to power in either house of Congress or will buoyant sentiment help Republicans keep hold of their Congressional majorities?

The latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey offers mixed signals, but leans against a wave Democratic election like that those that swept Republicans to power in 2010 and 2014.

The poll of 800 Americans across the country, with a margin of error of 3.5 percent, found a six-point Democratic lead on the question of who voters will choose in the November congressional elections. The 42 percent to 36 percent margin is not far from what pollsters would expect given the greater percentage of Democratic registered voters.

"A six point differential is not something that's going to cause a big electoral wave," said Micah Roberts, the Republican pollster on the CNBC poll, a partner Public Opinion Strategies. "Economic confidence that people have among a lot of groups is providing a buffer" for Republicans.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/15/mixed-s ... r=sharebar

And while an ABC poll finds a nine point Democrat lead in the generic congressional poll, 53-42, in the sixty-six districts that are actually competitive, that actually are in play, Republicans lead those by a single point, 47-46.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/note-po ... d=58495577

How is this a landslide? We'll see what actually happens. But even if Ds take the house, that in of itself isn't a "landslide" feat. Democrats have an inherent numbers advantage. And post presidential election swings in Congress are normal. So normal, if Ds don't take both chambers back, that's a bad sign for you. If you don't even take the house back, a very bad sign.

A landslide is what happened in 16. Defying all forecasts. Barely taking the house back ain't a landslide, buddy.

Perhaps a review of history is in order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political ... _over_time

Democrats, historically, have controlled Congress. It's pretty interesting to review this history. For the vast majority of the 20th century to present day, the Democrats ran Congress. Not only ran it, but with huge margins. A particular long streak from 1930s until late 1990s. What happened? Bill Clinton is what happened. He turned people off in a big way, it swung back to GOP for the first time since forever. And then Bush's stupid wars turned people off again, so it swung back to Democrats and then Obama. But then Obama was a disaster too. He didn't have Bill's baggage, a generally likable fellow, but he was profoundly incompetent, back to GOP again for the second time.

Democrats have all the advantages. Numbers advantage. Home field advantage. Emotional appeal. But over and over and over again they keep screwing themselves. The story of the past 30 years is a story of democrats going off the rails. Bill Clinton completely screws things up. Instead of throwing him under the bus, what do you do? You crown his wife in the senate, you crown his wife as the SOS. And then you hand her the nomination as if its her birthright. Looking back, the whole thing is quite comical.

Now you're getting beat by a bad combover guy calling people "horseface" on Twitter. ROFL. Why's he popular? Not because he's some constitutional savant, but simply because he's the guy that was willing to voice what so many have been thinking for a long time and point out all the ridiculous ____ you guys do. That's it. You want to beat Trump, just stop doing ridiculous ____. You guys should be the ones making fun of the Elizabeth Warrens.

The competitive distrcts are competitive? You don't say. Thanks for the update professor.

Your own post argues for a 9 point Dem advantage. If that held on election day for the House, it would be the second largest landslide in votes behind only 2008 since the 90's. It would be larger than both Republican waves in 1994 and 2010. That the election is close around that mark makes my point, not refutes it. If you take the lower bound number in your post of 6 points, that would put it around the 2010 Republican advantage that is generally thought of as a crushing wave. The fact that these kind of numbers are unlikely to produce much in the way of actual defeats for Republicans speaks to the extent of their artificial geographic edge. That's the point.

2016 is the opposite of a landslide. Republicans won by a single point in the House. That just translated into a much larger % of House seats primarily because of gerrymandering. In the presidential election, Republicans got fewer votes. And if you try to redefine landslide as the marginal difference between polling averages and outcomes, it was an aggregate polling error of about 2%. This is smaller than normal and near identical to the error in Obama's favor in 2012. I assume that you were trying to say the most wrong thing possible for effect.

Your political story for why Democrats majority coalition evaporated is also way wrong. That is almost entirely explained in a political realignment that occurred around civil rights leading socially conservative (read: racist) Democrats to shift over time away from the Democratic party into the Republican party. This picked up speed in the 60's and transitioned all the way past the 90's. The electoral shift took that much time because voter preferences gradually shifted to a 50/50 equilibrium and the Dixiecrats lost their illegal, unethical institutional advantages in the South. Roughly the same culture is there, but it's now Republican instead. At the same time, liberal Republicans mostly shifted into the Democratic party.

[_EAllusion]

538's first gubernatorial forecast is out. It's currently projecting that after this election cycle, states with a Democratic governor will have about 60% of the population, but represent only 40% of the states. That's a good example how geographic sorting makes it important to understand the difference between political representation and popularity.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

538's first gubernatorial forecast is out. It's currently projecting that after this election cycle, states with a Democratic governor will have about 60% of the population, but represent only 40% of the states. That's a good example how geographic sorting makes it important to understand the difference between political representation and popularity.

Well, what's the alternative? I don't know how one achieves balance where everyone's favorite political party gets a seat at the table. You either have a tyranny of the majority or a tyranny of the minority. In either case you have have a proper government sensitive to the needs of most of its electorate, or horrible atrocities committed against the population out of power (or something in between like most democracies experience).

What small tweaks would you institute that wouldn't require an amendment or two to our Constitution?

- Doc

[_Chap]

I don't know how one achieves balance where everyone's favorite political party gets a seat at the table.

Well, follow this link and you will see a description of a voting system that achieves that a lot of the time. It's not perfect, but is it worse than the present system? Perhaps it might be better than the present winner-takes-all setup?

Proportional representation could save America

Sometimes there are simple solutions to complicated problems.

And I, personally, have long thought that the thorny complex of issues related to polarization and the increasing bitterness of American politics might have a relatively simple solution: multi-member House districts.

The way this would work is that most states, instead of being split into one or two or three or four or eleven House districts would just operate as a unitary electoral zone. Voters would vote via ranked-choice voting, and you then end up with a proportional result. (The mechanics of how you do the tally are a little complicated, but the actual voting is easy — you just rank as many candidates as you want in order of preference.)

Consequently, you wouldn’t have anything like the current situation anymore, where 30 percent of the voters in Massachusetts backed Trump and 30 percent of the voters in Oklahoma backed Clinton, but Massachusetts returns a uniformly Democratic House delegation and Oklahoma returns a uniformly Republican one.

Relatedly, but not identically, you’d basically eliminate gerrymandering as a factor in American public affairs. The biggest states, like California, Texas, Florida, New York, and maybe Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, would probably need to be split into two or three (or maybe even four for California) states; boundary-drawing would matter there, but only a little.

One quick result of this would be that no seat is truly safe. Some states would be reliably conservative and others reliably liberal, but any given member would need to retain a reputation for being hard-working and honest to avoid falling just off the bubble.

But more importantly, without requiring anyone to change their minds about anything, or suddenly become nicer people, this reform would do a lot to help us back away from conducting politics on a quasi-war footing.

Breaking down the party system
But the bigger useful change is that under proportional House elections, third parties would win at least some of the seats.

Right away, the Democratic Socialists of America might run its own candidates and pick up a few here and there. We’d see a few Libertarians win too. But also, a guy like perennial candidate Greg Orman could stop running vanity statewide races in Kansas and win a House seat. Consistently endangered House members like Carlos Curbelo in Florida, Collin Peterson in Minnesota, and Will Hurd in Texas might split off and run under some kind of moderate banner.

The immediate upshot is House control would likely end up involving some kind of power-sharing arrangement. That could usefully prevent the current scenario, where the president’s party holds concurrent majorities in Congress and, consequently, oversight just shuts down entirely.

America’s other elections would still happen under nonproportional rules. Still, once you had a few minor parties in Congress, it might be tempting for a couple of senators who are bad fits for their current party — think of Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin — to jump ship.

You could end up with a situation where the party system simply varies from state to state. Some kind of Manchin/Murkowski party might end up playing the role of not-Republicans in natural resource extraction states where the national Democratic Party brand is bad.

And if third parties had clout in Congress, that might inspire at least some states to adopt proportional rules for state legislatures too. In theory, at least, a state could even adopt a parliamentary system.

I’m not personally hankering for a third party to vote for, as I have some fairly banal Democratic Party views these days. But I still think it would be a healthy development for the country.

We are too big and too diverse for a single unified vision to garner majority support, so the system objectively incentivizes President Donald Trump’s successful strategy of turning politics into a cynical game about beating the other side.

It would be better to have a country where everyone is voting for a party they are genuinely enthusiastic about, and then because no such party commands majority support, the leaders need to do some bargaining.

This is an abbreviated web version of The Weeds newsletter, a limited-run newsletter through Election Day, that dissects what’s really at stake in the 2018 midterms. Sign up to get the full Weeds newsletter from Matt Yglesias, plus more charts, tweets, and email-only content.

[_EAllusion]

538's first gubernatorial forecast is out. It's currently projecting that after this election cycle, states with a Democratic governor will have about 60% of the population, but represent only 40% of the states. That's a good example how geographic sorting makes it important to understand the difference between political representation and popularity.

Well, what's the alternative? I don't know how one achieves balance where everyone's favorite political party gets a seat at the table. You either have a tyranny of the majority or a tyranny of the minority. In either case you have have a proper government sensitive to the needs of most of its electorate, or horrible atrocities committed against the population out of power (or something in between like most democracies experience).

What small tweaks would you institute that wouldn't require an amendment or two to our Constitution?

- Doc

The Constitution was written to create a majoritarian government with a variety of institutional checks meant to prevent tyranny of the majority. That our institutional checks are now creating a situation where tyranny of the minority is a nascent threat is even worse than the problem those checks were trying to solve. Jamelle Bouie had an article on this recently that is on point:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... ution.html

Without some needed Constitutional amendments, I think the easiest things we could do right now would be

1) National gerrymandering reform to set up independent commissions to draw district boundaries in all 50 states. A common model involves 7 member commissions with 6 members equally represented by each party and an independent expert approved by an appointed judge with each party having veto power over map proposals. This tends to produce fairer maps. The main drawback here is that it locks out 3rd party representation, but it's a significant improvement over the current situation.

2) National automatic voter registration coupled with moving federal election days to Mondays and making them a national holiday.

3) Making D.C. and Puerto Rico states as they prefer to band-aid growing state imbalances.

4) Expanding the number of Congressional representatives considerably (at least to 1000) and growing the body as the population grows.

[_EAllusion]

The Nationalist Party, South Africa's authoritarian apartheid government started out as a minority party that only held power because of gerrymandering. It morphed into a brutal regime that was able to hold onto power while oppressing its people for generations. I think some people naïvely assume that if a party gets unpopular enough, then they'll just eventually be booted out. But if a minority in power is willing to ditch democracy, then they can hold on for a very long time. Watching Republicans grow increasingly factional and increasingly willing to subvert democratic norms to game election outcomes is a very concerning trend.

[_Brackite]

I recently just voted, and these are the people who I voted for.

Democratic Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema for US Senator. Congresswoman Sinema was endorsed by the Arizona Republic, and she is a moderate who has voted with Trump about 62% of the time. Link
(I don't give a crap about her left-wing protesting past.)

Republican Governor Doug Ducey for a 2nd term as Governor. The Arizona Republic along with the liberal-leaning Arizona Daily Star endorsed Ducey for a 2nd term. Link

Democratic State Senator Katie Hobbs for AZ Secretary of State. She wants to make it a bit easier for people to vote while her GOP Opponent wants to make it a bit more difficult for people to vote. Also, the Arizona Republic endorsed Kattie Hobbs for AZ Secretary of State.

Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich for a 2nd term as Attorney General.

Republican Kimberly Yee for Arizona Treasurer.

Surprisingly, I still have a bit of Republican left in me.