Majority Watch has some new polling results from the October 8-10 time period. Here are the results for candidates on the Booman Tribune ActBlue candidate list.
Darcy Burner is trailing 48%-45%.
Patty Wettterling is leading 50%-45%
Charlie Brown trails 52%-44%
Jack Davis leads 56%-40%
Zach Space leads 52%-41%
Chris Carney leads 50%-43%
Linda Stender trails 48%-46%
Those numbers are great, but Stender, Burner, and Brown are still trailing. Make sure you contribute. You can’t get a Democracy worth having if you won’t fund it.
They good news is that this latest crop of polls shows the Democrats taking control of Congress with a 19 seat majority. The bad news is that the elections are not today and these candidates are not all over the hump.
Dave Reichert is helping her out:
(By the way, if you click the link watch out for the comments. The comment threads on Horse’s Ass are inhabited by wingnut trolls, and tend toward the toxic — although the rebuttals to the trolls’ cut-and-pasted talking points are often a thing of beauty.)
3.5 million immigrants per year needed to replace retiring baby boomer.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003289618_bernanke05.html
Londonbear’s diary is pretty big news…
Let me just say that the Wetterling numbers are really not that solid. That district has very wealthy ex-urbs and some very rural areas. Needless to say, it has quite a few wing-nuts of a couple differnt stripes. That Patty Wetterling is doing as well as she is has everything to do with the nasty stench surrounding the Foley scandal.
BUT it is a hard district to read and she needs every dime she can get to keep her ads going. As long as we can keep the scandals fresh in people’s minds and keep Patty out in front as an alternative we have a great chance. She will need every little bit of push we can muster to get over the top, and only a strong media presence is going to keep it a reality.
Let me just underscore how big a pickup this seat would be- it is a Red District in this purpling state. Patty is a great organizer and would probably be a very good Congresswoman. That and Minnesotan’s tendency to keep with a good thing could make her a multi-term progressive Congresswoman from a district the Repub’s have recently taken for granted.
GIVE HER YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY.
Thank you.
(whew, been a while since I’ve done that…)
PS, the voting machines in MN are among the best in the nation, so the votes will count here!!!
how the house and senate would stack up – liberal or progressive/ moderate / conservative even if the dems took 20 seats? Would there be enough progressives to really push for an agenda to blow out all of the waste and corruption that has been going on for the last 6 years? Our so-called moderates really are conservative sometimes. And our conservatives are really archaic sometimes. I would like to believe that a true broom was sweeping down the halls of congress, but I know that 1) if we win it will probably take a large miracle to wade through all of the voting minefields the repubs have created and 2)how many dems are going to be just Liebermans?
That’s a complicated question. I will be writing about some of these things in the coming days.
Assuming that we take the House, it will be the first time ever that the Democrats held the house without a majority of the seats being from the South or border states. It will further separate the county into northern and southern regions. We may even win seats in Idaho and Wyoming, but other than a seat in Virginia, two in North Carolina, a few in Florida, and Tom DeLay’s seat, we are not looking at winning jack in the south. Actually, we might win a couple in Kentucky too, but we will still have a decidely coastal and northern majority.
I think we can expand into the southwest, too.
Regardless, this kind of party is still not too well placed to win the electoral college. We must find a way to appeal to the south, and we cannot do it on being more fundamentalist Christian and anti-immigrant, and pro-Empire than the GOP. That leaves populism. Specifically, it leaves economic populism. And that creates problems in the northern suburbs where we are finally breaking through.
It’s a tug-o-war. The southern-based DLC was designed to attract corporate funding to southern Democrats. The effect was to wipe out southern Democrats and elect Northern Democrats in the tax-averse Northern suburbs.
I don’t know how to pull off both at once, but we are at a good moment to finesse some of this.
The Senate has seven progressives (Boxer, Kennedy, Feinstein, Leahy, Wyden, Murray, and Harkin). We are looking at adding Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders. Others will revert to more liberal inclinations once in the majority, like Dodd and Lautenberg. Menendez will probably disappoint, but will probably log in as one of the more progressive Senators.
The good thing is that Boxer, Kennedy, and Leahy all stand to gain committees.
Things will improve, but we need to get to a point where we do not need to rely on people like Bayh, Carper, Clinton, Pryor, the Nelsons, and Landrieu.