If you just need some red-meat for anti-Trumpers, though, Vanity Fair has you covered.
“There is some P.T.S.D. from 2016,” said Amy Walter, the editor of the Cook Political Report. “Nobody wants to go out and feel too confident because of the ‘what if’ factor. All of the indicators are, ‘Boy, this is going to be really bad for Republicans.’ If you’re the party in power, and your incumbents in districts that were easily held before are now only up within the margin of error, that’s not good. Or you can look at it and say, ‘Well in 2016, Hillary was up by the margin of error and look what happened!’”
Walter’s point is that Trump’s election created a crisis of confidence inside the political world like nothing that has come before. His victory broke so many assumptions—all of the hallowed “rules”—about how politics is supposed to work. Journalists placed great faith in certain inside-baseball factors that now seem somehow less relevant: the importance of fund-raising, the need to hire blue-chip staffers, the impact of the dreaded “gaffe,” how demographic coalitions actually vote, the value of polling and television advertising, and America’s tolerance for politically incorrect rhetoric and even straight-up racism.
And so heading into the midterms, smart people are staying away from the prediction game. When predictions do occur, they are imbued with caution. Even though Democrats are marching in the streets, super-charging their voter-registration numbers, electing a new generation of candidates, and making Republicans play defense even in Texas—all obvious factors that would normally point to a Democratic takeover—people in Washington are still tiptoeing carefully. The safest thing to say is that Democrats might take the House, and they probably won’t take the Senate. Everyone is debating whether there will be a blue wave, not nodding in wide-eyed agreement that there will definitely be a blue wave, even though the anti-Trump energy in this country has been apparent from the very moment he took office in 2017. All of it’s because in the Trump era, we’re all asking ourselves the same question: does anyone know anything about politics anymore?
I completely agree with that article. There is a lot of concern trolling and hand-wringing about the whole mid-term situation… but I suspect the truth is staring us all in the face and everyone is too gun-shy to come out and say it.
This isn’t rocket science - Democrats are as excited as ever. Independents hate Trump. Trump himself is one of the most unpopular Presidents in our history. Democrats have consistently shown very well in special elections and primary turnout.
I suspect we wake-up the day after the elections and go ‘Duh, that was obvious’.
The other question I have to ask is are we factoring in the impact of Russian tampering? Is anyone actually working on defense in a coordinated way and will we know if or to what extent it happened?
I’d once have thought that these would be by far the most important questions two months away from a national election but lately they barely seem to rate.
IDC getting it’s collective blue-dog DINO thumbs slammed in the door in New York tonight. Kind of.
5 of the 6 IDC “democrats” are trailing in their primaries right now. To actual, you know, Democrats.
I would hope that somebody is paying attention to actual hacking of voter rolls and election results, but if the comments sections of any remotely political story on ArsTechnica are anything to go by, the Russian sock puppets are out in force, rehashing the same tired Trumppalo talking points. Today it was a story about an “all hands” meeting at Google shortly following the election, and the sockpuppeteers claiming that as “proof” that Google is manipulating its search results against Trump and the GOP.
These all look like reliably performing democratic districts come Nov 6th.
Six former members of the IDC and state senate incumbents have been ousted: Klein (D-Bronx); Marisol Alcantara (D-Manhattan); Tony Avella (D-Queens); Jesse Hamilton (D-Brooklyn), Jose Peralta (D-Queens), David Valesky (D-Syracuse).
Two others, plus another “Dem” defector Simcha Felder who was not an IDC member, all won their primaries. Felder could deliver a working majority to the senate republicans if all the other pieces remain on the board. But who the heck knows in this topsy turvy politics.
I don’t get the hate from Booker coming from the left. He voted against a few really stupid drug policy fixes like ‘buy drugs from Canada which are price controlled because Canada price controls them’ which is a pure stunt. If you want to price control drugs in the US just do it. Don’t route all the traffic through another country.
Reading lately that Cuomo is now a presidential name under consideration for the Dems. Filled with horror. A corrupt, malicious, stupid pol, not even the shadow of his father. The worst of all Democratic choices I can think of.
