Month: November 2012

Campaigns have different ways of looking at voters that can also change over time. But a basic way of looking at a voter is to look at their voting history. For our purposes here, forget about people who were too young to vote in 2008 or 2010. Take the universe of people who were registered to vote in 2008 and are still registered today. They had the opportunity to vote in the 2008, 2010, and 2012 primaries, and they had the opportunity to vote in the 2008 and 2010 general elections. So, that’s a maximum of five elections and a minimum of zero. Let’s forget about zero because they might have even been dropped off the active roll. Each voter in this universe can be assigned a number between 1 and 5. Five would be for someone who has voted in all five elections and one would be someone who voted in just one of those five elections (probably for president in 2008).

The next step is to look at one of two things. If the state has partisan registration, which party is the voter registered with? If the state doesn’t have partisan registration, which party primaries (if any) did they vote in?

Armed with this data, the campaigns can identify their strong supporters, their weak supporters, and those that fall somewhere in between. These days, the campaigns have much more information about us like what magazines we subscribe to and god knows what else. But we don’t need to make this too complicated.

When it comes to the fours and the fives, those voters will get themselves to the polls on their own without cajoling from the campaigns. They are the lowest priority. It’s the ones, twos, and threes that need attention. If you haven’t voted since November 2008, it is not a safe bet that you will vote next Tuesday. If you never vote in primaries, you are not a totally committed voter. So, the main focus of the campaigns should be to focus on these “unlikely” voters first. This is much easier to do in states with early voting. You start with the ones, two, and threes, plus the new registrants who have never voted before, and you try to get them to the polls. Then, by Election Day, you can focus on making sure the fours and fives didn’t get a flat-tire or wind up with a sick child or an overflowing toilet.

In this way, you winnow down the list until you have wrung every last vote out of the registered voter pool.

Let’s look at this in action in Florida:

A trusted Democratic operative sent us some data on the early and absentee ballot vote in Florida so far to make the point that Barack Obama is crushing Mitt Romney when it comes to banking the votes of sporadic and infrequent voters before election day. So far more than 3 million Floridians have cast a ballot by absentee, mail-in ballot or in-person early vote ballot. Democrats lead by more than 60,000 votes, but it’s the unlikely voter numbers that jump out:

Of the nearly 414,000 Floridians who did not vote in the last three general elections, Democrats have an advantage of more than 53,000 votes. Of the more than 482,000 Floridians who have only voted in one of the last three general elections, Democrats lead by more than 77,000 – a total of more than 132,000.

This measure is slightly different. It measures voters by whether they voted in the general elections of 2010, 2008, and 2006. I don’t understand why they did it that way because it adds two years beyond what is necessary and ignores primary voting which is very informative. But, whatever, the principles are the same.

The Democrats are aggressively banking the hardest to get votes. They are whittling down their list to make it more manageable on Election Day. The advantage is not just that they got a vote that they might have otherwise lost, but that they can focus on a smaller universe of people who are easier to persuade to go out and vote because they are used to voting.

When people talk about the ground game, this is how it manifests itself. The Republicans are slapping themselves on the back because they have succeeded in limiting the Democrats’ overall early voting advantage by curtailing the hours. They think they are doing better than 2008 as a result. But the Democrats aren’t focusing on getting their reliable voters to the polls, yet.

To put it another way, that 132,000 vote advantage the Florida Dems have wracked up among sporadic voters cannot be replicated in Pennsylvania because we don’t have early voting. Would the Republicans like to spot us that advantage in Pennsylvania? Would they argue that they’re doing better than in 2008 if they did?

Smart is better than dumb and organized is better than disorganized. Obama has a big ground advantage, and it will show up in states with early voting more than in states without it.

Nick Thorpe reported for BBC on the response to the arrest of Mladic in Sarajevo last year.

There is a lightness in the air, a mood of celebration among Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) about the arrest. But Muki – short for Muamera – says she can no longer share it.

“First reaction was, right, good news,” she says.

“But then, as I turned on the TV and watched all the footage… the scenes from the war… it brought back all the bad memories, stuff that I normally have flashbacks and nightmares about, that I and everybody [else] tries to block out. So it is not a happy day for me.”
…

In an extended broadcast of the interview with Maki or another young woman (one I can’t find), the interviewee stated that she thought everyone in Sarajevo suffered from PTSD and they all do their best to just go on.  She concluded with a statement that on balance the capture of Mladic was good but it wasn’t without a new cost to the victims of Serbian war crimes.
I flashed back to that interview after reading Steven D’s diary GOP Candidate: “Incest Is So Rare” at dKos and Damnit Janet’s comments. In particular:

I’m spinning back to the need for vengence and that’s not me.  I can’t be that person.  

I’m angry because no matter what it always boils down to the fucking fact that I was raped.  

I’m more than that.

For some large population of Americans, it always “boils down the the fucking fact” that they were sexually assaulted and all will carry with them some degree of PTSD.  It required extraordinary courage and a not insignificant number of tears for so many women and men to observe the legal proceedings against Jerry Sandusky.  That was an experience much like what Maki said about the arrest of Mladic.  Painful but on balance worth it.

What the GOP has been doing for the past year to sexual assault victims is nothing short of cruel and unusual: trigger sexual assault PTSD flashbacks.  Torture.  Perhaps one of their “think-tanks” contracted with
Mitchell-Jessen & Associates psychologists on expanding their torture techniques to a mass population.  Grind it through a Luntz word-salad-spinner and out comes whole new categories of rape such as “legitimate rape,” “honest rape, and “emergency rape.”  Terms that undermine decades of feminist efforts to destimatize victims of sexual assault.  Terms designed to empower bullies and harm real victims.  Confident that victims are too confused and/or pained by the attacks to repel them fully.  Confident that the range of the emotional effects of sexual assault protects the aggressors from any united and concerted backlash from the victims and their supporters.

The fact that the GOP elites and moneybags aren’t distancing themselves from their mouth-breathing front men engaging in the ritual torture of sexual assault victims suggests that they’re seeing a long-term winner.  

“First they came for ….”

The torture genie is out of the bottle.

 

When I went to sleep on Election Night 2008, it looked like Al Franken had lost in Minnesota and Jeff Merkley had lost in Oregon, and Mark Begich had lost in Alaska. I was psyched about Obama winning, but I knew we were screwed if he had fallen short of getting 60 senators. As it turned out, the Democrats won all three races, but that didn’t become clear until all the votes were counted (and in Minnesota, recounted and recounted). I point this out for two reasons. First, we may not know who won some senate races for days, weeks, or perhaps even months after Election Day. Second, on the night of November 6th, we will be very relieved to know for certain that Mitt Romney is not going to be our president, but we are going to have to deal with the harsh reality that the Republicans will still have way too much power. There is no way we can get back to a 60 vote supermajority in the Senate and it is looking unlikely that we will retake control of the House. So, I have two pieces of advice. If you are in a position to help someone who is running for Congress, please do so. And, be prepared to support filibuster reform.

Finally, get ready to deal with the reality of a president who is newly elected but who has to make a deal with John Boehner on the fiscal situation. Even if we elect progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono to the Senate, if the Dems have a good night we will also be electing Angus King and Joe Donnelly and Tim Kaine and Heidi Heitkamp and Richard Carmona and maybe even Bob Kerrey. And if you look at the senators up for reelection in 2014 you will quickly realize that job number one for keeping control of the Senate will be to find candidates who can compete in places like Tennessee and South Carolina and Texas, while holding on to seats in Alaska and Montana and South Dakota and Arkansas and Louisiana.

Progressives need to understand the political landscape so that they don’t enter a second Obama term with the same unrealistic expectations with which they entered the first.

When President Obama defeats Romney in a few days time, the MSM are going to have to engage in a major excuse management and damage limitation exercise, spinning the result as not really a win for Democratic values and arguing that Obama must now implement Republican policies. Here’s a sample of what you can expect to hear:

1. Obama won the most divisive campaign in history. It’s time to heal the wounds and govern from the center.
2. Obama only won because of Sandy. He doesn’t have a mandate.
3. Romney was a RINO candidate – the Republicans made a mistake in not nominating a real conservative.
4. Obama must now lead and implement Simpson-Bowles (despite the fact that the party stressing debt reduction lost the election).
5. Our pundits and pollsters only called the election wrong because there was a very late (and irrational) swing to the President
6. Obama wins clear victory but must now be more bipartisan in his approach
7. Obama has lost the trust of the white electorate and must now take urgent steps to win it back
8. Minorities only voted for Obama because he is black. That’s unAmerican.
9. Women only voted for Obama because Romney is too old for them
10. Young people only voted for Obama because they were misled and misinformed. Polls show only 5% of young people understand basic economics. (Note to Ed. we need to commission a Rasmussen poll on this quick).
11. The less well off voted against Romney because they were envious of his success and want the Government to redistribute his wealth.
12. It’s all Chris Christie’s fault for undercutting the standard narrative that Obama is incompetent and Government can’t do anything right.

Please add your MSM excuses in the comments below. Be prepared!

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has endorsed Barack Obama. While the endorsement is certainly half-hearted, it is nonetheless helpful. Every little bit helps. Probably more heartbreaking for Mitt Romney is the endorsement from The Economist. Almost literally, no one gives a crap about what The Economist thinks. The people who actually do are frequent dinner guests at the Romneys many homes. These plutocratic endorsements should have been a cinch for Mitt Romney, and he lost them both because he is a gigantic liar.

When Richard Mourdock torpedoed his own campaign by talking about how God intends women to deliver rape babies, a lot of people noted that Mourdock was the only Senate candidate in the country for whom Mitt Romney had cut a television commercial. That is no longer true. Romney has just cut an advertisement in support of Danny Rehberg who is running against Sen. Jon Tester in Montana. That can only be a good sign for Sen. Tester. I am not saying that he welcomes Mitt Romney’s effort on behalf of his opponent, but the ad would not have been created if Rehberg was not in deep jeopardy of losing. When I did my previous predictions for the Senate elections, I predicted that Jon Tester would lose. But I am rethinking that assumption. Of the two most recent polls, one shows the race tied and the other shows Tester up by two points. I have to consider that the strongest available evidence about that status of the race is that Romney just intervened.

On the other hand, I have grown more pessimistic about Shelley Berkley’s chances in Nevada. If she wins, she will outperform her polling substantially. Don’t forget that Harry Reid did exactly that just two years ago. But the early voting advantage the Democrats have amassed in Nevada is underwhelming enough that I think Berkley is in trouble. Rather than predict she will win, I feel more comfortable saying that it will be very, very close.

The only other change I want to make from my last set of predictions is that Bob Kerrey’s chances in Nebraska continue to improve. Today, he is rolling out the endorsement of Chuck Hagel, which I think is probably the most important endorsement he could have received. A recent Omaha World-Herald poll had Kerrey down by only three points. There is no question that Kerrey has all the momentum in the race, but the question is whether or not he will run out of road before he can pass Deb Fischer. I know most progressives are ambivalent at best about Bob Kerrey returning to the Senate, but these are six year terms. Every seat matters. I am not ready to predict that Kerrey will win, but I will no longer be shocked at all if he does.

I still think Richard Carmona will pull it out in Arizona and that the Democrats will pick up seats in Maine, Massachusetts and Indiana. I also think Heidi Heitkamp will win in North Dakota. In other words, my only change is to put Tester into the ‘win’ column and to put Berkley into the ‘loss’ column, but the overall result would be the same. Instead of picking up five seats and losing two, I have us picking up four seats and losing one. And, if Bob Kerrey wins, I have us losing no seats and netting four. So, 56-44 without Kerrey and 57-43 with him.

Now this is a terrific political ad:

youtube

Some context:  Richard Tisei spent 26 years as a Republican in the Massachusetts state legislature before running for (and losing) lieutenant governor in 2010.  He’s likely to defeat 8-term incumbent John Tierney—who’s been politically damaged by a family scandal that’s included his wife’s conviction on tax fraud charges—in next week’s election.

Tisei also fits the profile of successful Republican candidates for federal or statewide office in Massachusetts:  fiscally conservative (i.e., anti-tax), socially liberal (100% ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood), and a “nice guy”.

Dropping this ad at the end of what’s been a long and bitterly fought race, with lots of SuperPAC money poured into Boston’s expensive media market, is brilliant.  It reinforces Tisei’s “nice guy-ness” and gives a sense of confidence that he’s going to win.  The footage is of one of the most popular public beaches in Massachusetts’ 6th District—one that most voters in the district either have fond personal associations with, or know people who do.

If Scott Brown’s campaign had this kind of judgment (instead of spending weeks questioning Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry, and misrepresenting her work on behalf of asbestos victims), there’s a good chance Brown would be cruising to victory instead of grinding out the last days of a too-close-to-call race.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

As the pollsters begin to report their final numbers they can no longer put influencing the election over accurately predicting it. That is because Election Day is the only day when these pollsters are accountable. The worse they do on Election Day, the fewer clients they will get and the less influence they will have in the next cycle. So, as if by magic, the Republican outlier polls will begin the “show” a surge for the president and the result can already be seen. The corporate pundits have called the race. A week ago is was “too close to call” and “incredibly close,” but today it is “baked in the cake” and there is “no way” for Romney to win. Absolutely nothing changed. Hurricane Sandy may have shut down the campaign rhetoric for a couple of days but it didn’t suddenly persuade millions of Americans to change their minds about who they intend to vote for. Obama was winning all along, from beginning to end, with never a single day when he would have or could have lost this election. The only real question was whether he could decisively win the argument and expand on his 2008 victory. If I had to guess, right now, I’d say that Obama will come up short of 2008. He will not win Indiana and he will probably fall a point short of 53% of the vote.

It’s a shame because, prior to the first debate where Obama let Romney stand with him on an equal footing, the trajectory was for a blowout election with Arizona coming into view and Missouri not far behind. Romney was staggered and flailing for two straight months and could have been knocked out. Obama let him off the ropes and the price is probably going to be control of the House of Representatives. And that means more dysfunction for two more years. Of course, the president doesn’t deserve all the blame for that. The districts are gerrymandered and corporate money is unlimited and unaccountable, the media isn’t an effective referee, and there are a lot of very gullible and misinformed people in this (and every other) country.

And, who knows? I could be wrong. Maybe we will win back the House.

That was the comment made by a Republican Congressional candidate John Koster. Here’s the audio of his statement:

I know you may have seen this already at the Great Orange Satan, but I felt I needed to respond personally to Mr. Koster. You see I know of many cases of incest, so it isn’t rare to me. For those with little stomach for the details of the women I describe below, all people I know, please read no further.

My first wife was a victim of incest as was her older sister. Her father raped them anally so they would not get pregnant. He was an alcoholic. He was also the minister of the church my family attended, and no one knew, for he was universally admired because he was such a good preacher. The incest went on for years.

My great-grandfather, also a minister, and a butcher by trade during the week, had thirteen children, eleven who lived. After his wife died in childbirth he began raping his daughters. Most still at home left the farm where they lived as soon as possible. My grandmother stayed behind. She never admitted to us whether she was also a victim, but I have my suspicions. My great aunts only told us of his rapes of them after he died.

I worked as a counselor for emotionally disturbed adolescents after I received my undergraduate degree. I specifically worked at one place where six teenage girls resided together, the oldest 15 and the youngest twelve. Four had been raped by relatives, either fathers or step-fathers. One 12 year-old was pregnant at the time I worked there, as a result of rape by her father. Twelve years old, Mr Koster. And no, she wasn’t permitted the choice to abort the child. Her parents would not consent.

I know of another woman, a friend of mine, who was raped by her brother over a period of 3 years beginning at the age of nine. As a result of the physical trauma she suffered, she cannot have children.

I imagine I’ve known many other incest victims in my lifetime who did not reveal that they had been raped by relatives. Incest is a highly under-reported crime. However, the studies that have been done paint a picture that incest is far from an uncommon occurrence for women in the United States. A 2006 study found a rate of child sexual abuse of 27.9% in two parent families of both black and white women. Studies of incest rates of in the US as of 1991 found that:

[T]he studies report childhood memories of contact sexual molestation at rates ranging from 6 to 45 percent for women and from 3 to 30 percent for men.

The lower incidence figures in these studies turn out to be due to the method used in compiling them, As one moves from the lower to the higher figures, one discovers that the interview techniques begin to acknowledge the resistances of the respondents to such emotional questions. The lower figures are in response to written questionnaires or brief telephone calls, contacts that were considered intrusive by the respondent, while the higher figures, such as those of Wyatt and Russell (48) were the result of carefully structured face-to-face interviews lasting from one to eight hours.(49) […]

Yet even these astonishingly high figures are only a portion of the hidden true incidence rates. Four additional factors raise the actual rates even higher:

1. The groups interviewed do not include many people in the American population who have far higher than average sexual molestation experiences, including institutionalized criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics (52),
2. the studies only count admissions to the interviewer of abuse, and it is unlikely that no conscious memories were ever suppressed during the interviews,
3. a large percent of each study refused to be interviewed, and these may have been the most victimized of all,(53) and
4. most importantly, these studies include only clear conscious memories of events-unconscious memories, which are usually only uncovered during psychotherapy, would increase these rates.

So, Mr. Koster is talking out of his anal orifice. Incest, based on my personal experience with the women who have shared their stories of incest, and based on the best available statistics we have on the matter, is not rare in the United States. Tragically, it is a all too common experience.

I understand Mr. Koster opposes a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. That is his right to hold and speak out about his views on the subject. But to make such untrue, inaccurate and misleading statements regarding incest among women in order to support his claim that abortion should not be available for women is an insult to those who have suffered from incest or who know of and care about victims of incest. The effects of incest last a lifetime.

Mr Koster’s party affiliation means nothing to me in this matter. Any Democrats who hold the same views, and use the same “incest is rare” argument to promote their own social policy goals, also deserve our scorn. We know from the scandals in the Catholic Church that many instances of childhood sexual abuse were covered up, or that the victims were too ashamed to come forward. Imagine yourself, if you can, as a child who is being sexually abused. Who do you tell when your own family members are perpetrating these crimes.? Who do you blame in these situations? As an adult, to whom do you feel comfortable sharing these horrific intimate details of your life? Most women never talk about what happened to them as children, of the sexual abuse by a father, brother, cousin or uncle because it is too painful, they feel too ashamed, they don’t want to stir up trouble in their family or they simply don’t want to re-live those painful experiences by revealing them to other people, even their partners and significant other.

Mr. Koster, I demand you apologize to everyone who has ever been sexually abused by a parent, sibling, or other relative. Your ignorant, (at that being generous on my part) comments are beyond offensive. They are a slur on every incest victim, and rub salt in psychological and physical wounds that will never truly heal.