The polling is just brutal. It kind of makes it hard to want to get out of bed in the morning. What’s really frustrating to see is results like this from Pennsylvania:
• PA-Sen, PA-Gov (Ipsos for Reuters): Joe Sestak (D) 46%, Pat Toomey (R) 46%; Dan Onorato (D) 43%, Tom Corbett (R) 49%
(Sestak leads 46-42 among RVs, and even Onorato leads 46-43 among RVs)
There is going to be a lot of blame slung around next week, regardless of how these midterms play out. I know the administration owns a lot of the blame. But people can only control what they do. And too many progressive opinion leaders have spent the last year sniping and complaining when all the signs were there that the left was in the fight of its life with a new brand of vicious reactionary homophobic xenophobic racist politics. Why they chose to focus so much on our own shortcomings and not too much on the threat we have been facing, I will never know. But the threat has arrived. And now we have a demoralized base. We’re going to lose seats all over the country where registered voters actually favor our candidates.
But, I have been warning you about this all year long. Grab some people and drag them to the polls. At least you’ll feel like you did your part.
Polling is brutal only if you believe that the pollsters have correctly identified a likely voter.
GOTV is crucial everywhere in this election. It could even upset some so-called safe Republicans.
Making decisions based on polls is increasingly a trap for Democrats. It lets them give up ground too easily. Candidates are not victims, and their supporters have a great degree of agency.
I’m not sure the polls are so accurate and I’m not sure the base is so demoralized. We know about the 25 percenters, but I’m not so sure the rest of the American mind has turned to jelly. There’s a perception war going on here too. There is definitely a countereffect when people are bombarded day after day by insane republicans.
What is responsible for the so-called gap? Is it really bloggers? What percentage of the voting public reads them? Is it the economy? Is it the fact that Obama’s kumbaya act made everyone complacent(meaning his bi-partisan nonsense)? Is it the fact that Obama is favoring the banksters over the regular people? Have enough people believed the “The Democrats are doooooommmeddd!!” bullcrap the TradMed has been force feeding us the past few months?
It’s the economy, the failure of the Congress to do anything meaningful about it and the fact that voters have been immunized to Keynesian economics as being “socialist”, which it isn’t.
Not to mention the iron curtain of the Village media.
And, in these closing weeks, the literally unprecedented post-Citizen United ocean of paid media.
What should have been the closing gap Booman and others predicted once more people started focusing on the election largely hasn’t happened because of all those ads (still the single biggest source of voter “information”) and the self-reinforcing narrative of a massive Republican wave.
How exactly do you know that the gap is not closing? The barrage of ads might turn out to create a backlash. The Democrats in general have held off large media buys until the last minute. The DCCC has just reserved $21 million in ads to support 66 House races, almost all of them for incumbents or for open Democratic seats.
True enough only a small percentage of folks read progressive blogs, but the MSM does. That’s the point. The media used the complaints and criticisms of progressive bloggers to push a false narrative that there was massive dissatisfaction among Democrats. Month-after-month of hearing this on tv and reading it the papers had the designed effect of exhausting and deflating Democrats.
I’ve been feeling just the opposite. I’m encouraged because I was pretty active during the 1994 midterms, and this year is radically different from then, and any other midterm I can remember.
I’ve never seen so much activity and enthusiasm, nationwide, for midterm elections. The Organizing has been incredible, and is a direct extension of 2008. By this point in 1994, the DLC-led DNC was already winding down DemocratIC offices around the country in favor of their fantastically failed “swing state” strategy.
I’ve never been much into polling, and even the most accurate polling companies overall, can be way off in individual races, as happened in 2008. We’ll probably lose some, but I think all this heavy-lifting that so many patriots are doing RIGHT NOW in DemocratIC offices around the country is going to pay surprising dividends come this Tuesday.
Full steam ahead!
I thought OFA had this one.
Snark, aside, this came up at DL last night: a couple of people identified the whole “shut down the outside groups” strategy as a real problem, specially in light of citizens’ united.
OFA is kicking ass. But every day they make a call to talk up the Democrats those same voters are saturated with negativity from the progressive outlets they listen to, watch, and read.
i don’t buy that one man. the majority of progressive opinion is on blogs, and the majority of americans don’t read blogs. But beyond that, i take issue with this notion that if it weren’t for those damn opinionated people that expected a lot more than watered down legislation, we’d be in the pink right now.
watered down legislation does not for excitement make.
I don’t buy it either, except maybe in the sense that the constant carping and whining in some quarters may have kept some activists from working at GOTV. But even there, I think the baseless media predictions of a GOP tsunami, starting more than a year ago, had a vastly greater effect.
It’s a complex situation with a lot of different factors in play:
It’s really pretty simple. Increasingly, people get their news from outlets that agree with them. So, left-leaning people tend to watch a lot more MSNBC than FOX, and vice-versa. They tend to form opinions based on the opinions of people they trust. When all the people they trust are bashing the administration’s product then that product is not going to be popular on the left or the right, and probably not in the middle either.
It’s rather obvious that this administration and this Congress has the most progressive achievements of any since 1965-66. That’s pretty impressive. But no one was willing to see things in any kind of perspective, or to take the threat seriously.
I don’t see that empirically happening in this part of the country. If it is happening at all and I need more than just the logic (which is credible), it is likely confined to liberal strongholds.
There are a heck of a lot of people who don’t have time to get the news from anyone but their personal networks, because they are working or job-hunting. And from canvassing and GOTV activities.
This about sums up how I feel:
“I know the administration owns a lot of the blame.” Blame for what? Blame for not stopping work saving the economy to pacify a bunch of pissy ass whining progressives?! You’re one of the more honest, objective and thoughtful bloggers out there of any political stripe, so I’ll cut you some slack, but the truth is this shit could have all been avoided. Had progressives been more disciplined and strategic in their push of the White House and Congress they wouldn’t have left the door open for the MSM to give legitimacy to the crazies, a pass to Republicans, all the while painting the President as a lazy negro who can’t control his base.
The White House hasn’t exactly been sending progressives flowers and roses. They’ve done a poor job of getting along with us. Lord knows, we’re petulant and short-sighted bunch of inveterate grumps, and we don’t deserve shit, but if you want us manning our oars, you have to treat us better and that’s just the way it is.
Plus, they should have listened to us about the mandate with no public option and the too-small stimulus. Those two issues, more than any other, are what is causing an enthusiasm gap between the two party bases.
i agree on that point, and have consistently pushed this. But i don’t think you agreed with me at the time.
What did I have to do? Did I have to write it a hundred times? Ninety-nine times wasn’t enough? I think Duncan and I were among the first bloggers to harp on the fact that a mandate without a public option was going to be enormously unpopular and basically political suicide. If my repetitiveness on that score didn’t sink in for you it is just another example of you forming a false impression about what I wrote in the past. On the stimulus size, I didn’t disagree that it should be larger, I just pointed out that it wasn’t going to be. To be honest, I had no idea how big it had to be. I listened to the experts like everyone else, and I felt there was a consensus that it would have to be significantly bigger to plug the hole that ripped into the bottom of the economy. But I also saw that the amount they passed only got thru at the cost of Arlen Specter’s career and party affiliation. It wasn’t going to be a bigger stimulus and that’s just the way it was.
Considering who’s come to prominence in The Party of No, I don’t see why being a petulant, short-sighted bunch of inveterate grumps should be a problem. ..
See, there you go again! I agree with every word of this. I know the public option was kind of a catch-all, but how about a Medicare buy-in? Are we petulant and what not? Sure!! Can you tell me the last time we were wrong about something? Would not cramdown be more helpful to home owners than HAMP? .. What it comes down to .. is we want change we can believe in!! ..
(Wonder where I heard that one before!)
You get the sense that progressives are finally waking up to the potential reality of a GOP takeover. Sad thing is it had to take a month before the election for folks to smell the coffee on how extreme these GOP candidates are. Long-term preparation wins election. Our side has been fighting each other for months on end.
Start blaming liberal voters early, Booman. That will really get them out to the polls. Cuz they haven’t had enough of that from whineful, spinless President Obama.
whineful?
whineful, full of whines.
Spineless, without a spine.
Although Obama’s good at pre-compromising with the Repubs instead of fighting. No one can top him at that.
The Latino vote in Arizona is highly engaged this cycle for obvious reasons. Hopefully we show up.
I’ve personally harassed 13 friends/family members to get registered and at least 20 others to get on the Permanent Early Voting List. I don’t know if it will be enough, though. We are in the eye of Hurricane TeaBag.
How does it compare to gaps between LVs and RVs in past elections? This seems to be a common theme in polling for a very long time.
Anyhow, either progressives have a lot of influence and should have been pandered to like any other interest group or the progressives are don’t have enough influence to depress turn out.