Martin Longman is the web editor of the Washington Monthly.
He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. Before joining the Monthly, Martin was a county coordinator for ACORN/Project Vote and a political consultant. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
The politics are pretty bad for McConnell. He’s trying to have it both ways but the people are not going to be fooled. The ads write themselves, and the early vote number suggest Ds should be slightly favored for both races. I may be wrong but I think Bonnie and Clyde are going down and we get our senate majority. It will be the biggest self own in politics in a century, maybe more.
It sounds like McConnell has a pretty good plan to poison pill the whole thing, so the right wing noise machine can blame democrats for killing it. Really I don’t know why we bother talking about the “politics” since reds and blues live in different informational universes. Everyone is going to vote for their side, so the only thing that matters is GOTV before an election and raw power afterwards.
Hmm, that may or may not be true in some contexts, but the most recent election doesn’t seem to bear it out. The electorate was in fact very Republican. 48% R, 47% D, and 5% independent in fact. For Biden to have won in an environment whereby the electorate was more Republican than Democratic, he had to have persuaded a significant number of Republicans. According to AP VoteCast, Biden won 8% of Republicans and Trump won 4% of Democrats. Granted, this is a very marginal number of people and the country is extremely split. This means “landslides” are off the… Read more »
Seabe, I agree with you with regards to the 2020 presidential. But that seems to be a special case, where there was a significant group of republicans who couldn’t countenance Trump. It seems much less likely that there is a similar group of people for a senatorial election. Anyway, I don’t actually have strong opinions about persuasion vs. GOTV. My point really is that persuasion is unlikely to work on the basis of policy, because the different informational systems will work overdrive to convince R-leaners that the policy is shit [e.g. Obamacare]…or, failing that, that the R party is really… Read more »
If we allow this to prevail – the grinch approach to everything and poison pills – we know what will happen. In 2010 we lost the majority in the house and congress was shit from then until 2016. The democrats have to stand up and that includes Joe in West Va, or we should invite him to leave.
The politics are pretty bad for McConnell. He’s trying to have it both ways but the people are not going to be fooled. The ads write themselves, and the early vote number suggest Ds should be slightly favored for both races. I may be wrong but I think Bonnie and Clyde are going down and we get our senate majority. It will be the biggest self own in politics in a century, maybe more.
It sounds like McConnell has a pretty good plan to poison pill the whole thing, so the right wing noise machine can blame democrats for killing it. Really I don’t know why we bother talking about the “politics” since reds and blues live in different informational universes. Everyone is going to vote for their side, so the only thing that matters is GOTV before an election and raw power afterwards.
This. Ignore the polls. Ignore the campaigns. Ignore the posturing.
It’s all GOTV and turnout.
Hmm, that may or may not be true in some contexts, but the most recent election doesn’t seem to bear it out. The electorate was in fact very Republican. 48% R, 47% D, and 5% independent in fact. For Biden to have won in an environment whereby the electorate was more Republican than Democratic, he had to have persuaded a significant number of Republicans. According to AP VoteCast, Biden won 8% of Republicans and Trump won 4% of Democrats. Granted, this is a very marginal number of people and the country is extremely split. This means “landslides” are off the… Read more »
Seabe, I agree with you with regards to the 2020 presidential. But that seems to be a special case, where there was a significant group of republicans who couldn’t countenance Trump. It seems much less likely that there is a similar group of people for a senatorial election. Anyway, I don’t actually have strong opinions about persuasion vs. GOTV. My point really is that persuasion is unlikely to work on the basis of policy, because the different informational systems will work overdrive to convince R-leaners that the policy is shit [e.g. Obamacare]…or, failing that, that the R party is really… Read more »
If we allow this to prevail – the grinch approach to everything and poison pills – we know what will happen. In 2010 we lost the majority in the house and congress was shit from then until 2016. The democrats have to stand up and that includes Joe in West Va, or we should invite him to leave.