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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Latinos, Sanders's secret weapon in Nevada, could make him unstoppable on Super Tuesday

https://news.yahoo.com/latinos-sanderss-secret-weapon-in-nevada-could-make-him-unstoppable-on-super-tuesday-015922411.html

BERNIE SANDERS SECRET WEAPON, LATINOS, COULD MAKE HIM UNSTOPPABLE GOING INTO SUPER TUESDAY

By Hunter Walker and Andrew Romano | Published February 22, 2020 | Yahoo News | Posted February 23, 2020 |

LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders’s Nevada caucus campaign ended with a convincing win Saturday afternoon, thanks in large measure to a 37-percentage-point victory among Latino caucus-goers. But the seeds of that victory were sown five years ago when a staffer on Sanders’s first presidential bid had trouble reading a Spanish website.

It was Memorial Day weekend 2015, about a month after the Vermont senator launched his long-shot challenge to Hillary Clinton. Sanders was short on resources; his staff was a skeleton crew, with no one who could translate Spanish. So the campaign summoned Chuck Rocha, the founder and president of Solidarity Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in reaching Latinos and blacks that was launched by Rocha in 2010. He charged Sanders triple his usual rate to work on the holiday.

“I remember sending him an invoice for $824, which was a big invoice for me,” Rocha told Yahoo News in an extensive interview five days before the Nevada caucus. “Little did I know that that $800 invoice would turn into millions and millions of dollars of work for Bernie Sanders.”

In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted two Sanders events, claiming the candidate wasn’t paying enough attention to racial issues. Jeff Weaver, the 2016 campaign manager, hired Solidarity Strategies to ensure that the senator’s work was, as Rocha put it, “reflective of the larger diverse communities.” Soon Rocha was consulting on minority hiring, outreach and advertising for Sanders. By the end of the race he was in charge of all of the campaign’s print communications.

Now Rocha, a 51-year-old self-described “Mexican redneck” who campaigns wearing a cowboy hat and driving a rented pickup truck, has become a leader of Sanders’s 2020 operation. While he remains in charge of his firm, Rocha officially joined the campaign last year as a senior adviser with a broad purview that includes general strategy, hiring staff and overseeing print ads and merchandise. Rocha also crafts the campaign’s Spanish-language ads on television, radio and the internet. If anyone is responsible for the huge Latino outreach effort that has helped propel Sanders to the front of the Democratic pack, it’s Rocha.

The innovative program is a dramatic contrast to 2016, when Clinton had highly specialized minority outreach operations and Sanders struggled to woo voters of color.

“This time around the Sanders campaign really has invested, and you see them everywhere,” says an operative who worked on Latino outreach for the Clinton campaign in 2016 and then worked with a 2020 candidate who left the race. “They are the ones who have consistently shown up at community events, in radio ads and newspapers. It’s very different from what they did in 2016. You have to understand the community first and then build your program around it — and I think they've done that."

That strategy could help make Sanders the nominee. The last time the senator competed in the Nevada caucuses, in 2016, he lost to Clinton by 8 percentage points. The defeat blunted Sanders’s momentum after his near-victory in Iowa and his New Hampshire landslide, and it put Clinton on a trajectory to win the nomination.

Yet there was an upside for Sanders that day: The Nevada entrance poll showed him beating the former secretary of state by 8 points among Latinos. The exact percentages were later disputed — the sample size was tiny, and precinct-level data suggested that Clinton did better than the poll indicated — but the larger implication was clear. In a race against America’s best-known Democrat, Sanders could hold his own in the Latino community.

The revelation took the senator’s own team by surprise.

“We didn't learn ’til the campaign was almost over how popular we were with Latinos,” Rocha said. “We had an idea, you know; 19-to-22-year-old Latinos thought Bernie was cool in ’16. But we didn’t realize that we could win their votes the way that we did, and we didn’t have enough time to take advantage of actually building the infrastructure to capture those votes.”

The lessons of 2016 gave Rocha an advantage heading into 2020 — and it was an edge that paid off Saturday, when entrance polls showed Sanders topping his nearest rival, Joe Biden, 53 percent to 16 percent among Nevada’s Latino caucus-goers. The same statistical caveats from 2016 still apply today. But this wasn’t an isolated incident. In Iowa, the entrance poll showed Sanders winning 43 percent of nonwhite voters; the next closest candidate was Pete Buttigieg with 15 percent. In New Hampshire, Sanders was nearly as dominant, winning nonwhite voters by 18 points and Latino voters by 22, according to the exit poll. Across the board, national surveys also show Sanders with anywhere from 30 percent to nearly 50 percent of the Latino vote.

To date, the Democratic Party has awarded only 2.5 percent of its 3,989 pledged delegates, so Sanders’s growing strength with Latinos hasn’t made much of a dent in the delegate math. But that’s about to change on Super Tuesday (March 3), when nearly 40 percent of the remaining pledged delegates will be doled out.

The good news for Sanders is that Super Tuesday’s two biggest prizes are California (415 pledged delegates) and Texas (228 pledged delegates) — states that also boast the largest Latino primary electorates in America (31 percent and 32 percent, respectively).

The calendar, in other words, is about to heavily favor the candidate who’s leading among Latinos. Mathematically, it could even make that candidate unstoppable.

The Sanders campaign has been preparing for this moment since last summer. On Saturday, the candidate skipped the usual in-state victory party in Nevada and traveled instead to Texas for a series of rallies. Two polls released this month show the senator leading in the Lone Star State for the first time. The day before the caucus, Sanders opted to leave Nevada to campaign in California, where the latest surveys show him ahead of the competition by more than 10 points overall and by more than 20 points among Latinos. Along with Texas and California, Rocha noted that Florida and Arizona primaries are both coming up, are heavily Latino, and are “loaded with delegates.”

“The math is right,” he said.

If Sanders wins both California and Texas, he will likely amass an insurmountable lead in the delegate count — and Rocha’s innovative Latino outreach effort will be a big reason why. Rocha believes campaigns have long botched their Latino outreach efforts by relying on largely white teams, insufficient investment and messages that aren’t “culturally competent.” He has sought to mount a push for Sanders that is historically diverse, large and involves a tailored advertising blitz.

“People say Latinos don’t vote. It’s because motherf***ers don’t ask them to vote,” said Rocha.

With his East Texas drawl and colorful sayings, Rocha is a natural raconteur who veers between swagger and self-deprecation. He’s clearly fond of telling his personal story. It begins in the town of Tyler, where he was born to two teenagers: a Mexican immigrant father and a white mother. After Rocha’s dad left five years later, he grew up eating “government cheese” in a mobile home on the grounds of his mother’s parents’ farm.

When Rocha was 18 years old, he had a child of his own. The experience led him to reconnect with his own father, who got him a job at the local tire factory. The gig ended up being Rocha’s entrée into union organizing — and ultimately, politics.

“Nobody in my family was involved in politics at any level,” Rocha said. “Nobody in my family had ever really graduated from high school, much less college. I was not a rabid activist in any way. I just wanted to get off my regular job to do union work, if I could, so I could drink more beer.”

Rocha became an officer with the local chapter of the rubber workers union, which merged with the United Steelworkers of America in 1995. Through the union hall, Rocha also began working on Democratic campaigns. In 1998 the national union summoned Rocha to Pittsburgh to serve as political director at the age of 30.

A decade later, Rocha left the union to start his firm. His career survived a potentially fatal setback in 2013 when he pleaded guilty to one felony count of embezzling from the union during his tenure as political director. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $2,000 after paying about $12,000 in restitution. Rocha describes the case as a partisan prosecution but also admits he “totally messed up” his expense reports, and he’s well aware the issue could have made him a liability for a presidential candidate.

“I am a convicted felon,” Rocha said. “And when you work in politics, that's not cool.”

Rocha claimed he tried to work for Clinton’s 2016 campaign before Sanders entered the field but wasn’t hired because his conviction came up during vetting. He nearly choked up while recounting the early meeting where he told Sanders and Weaver about his background. According to Rocha, they were both adamant that he shouldn’t spend his life paying for a past mistake.

“I’m not politically afraid of this story at all,” Weaver said in 2016 after Politico highlighted Rocha’s conviction, adding that he wanted the world to see that Sanders believed in giving a former felon a chance. “Please, I’m asking you to print.”

Staff diversity has, in turn, become the cornerstone of Rocha’s Latino outreach efforts for Sanders. He said the campaign has “Latinos in senior management in every department of the headquarters and in every state” — including 76 Latino staffers in Nevada alone, where Sanders also opened 11 offices and spent more than $3 million on Spanish-language advertising. Despite the encouraging signs from 2016, not everyone on Sanders’s campaign thought that a substantial investment in the Latino electorate — which typically turns out at a rate of less than 50 percent — would pay off. But Sanders himself was a believer, according to Rocha.

“It's something he talks to me about every time he sees me,” Rocha said of Sanders. “‘How is it going? What are we doing?’ He wants to know because he’s such an organizer. … He wants new people to vote, and he knows that there’s a treasure trove in the Latino community.”

Rocha’s ads for Sanders aren’t straightforward translations of his English messages; they are written specifically for Latinos and focus on the aspects of Sanders’s platform that most resonate with that audience, including raising the minimum wage, eliminating student debt, reinstating the DACA program, breaking up ICE and the Border Patrol and placing a moratorium on deportations to allow for an audit of past immigration policies.

The pitch is also heavy on Sanders’s own immigration story, which has been much more central to his 2020 campaign than it was in 2016; in fact, the first Spanish-language ad that Rocha ran in each medium focused on Sanders’s father coming to the United States from Europe “broke” and unable to speak English.

“Guess what? That's my grandfather’s story,” Rocha said. “That’s Latinos … somebody in our family. It’s their story.”

But while the overarching messages may be similar, the Sanders camp also adjusts its ads for different audiences within the Latino community. Ads targeted at Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans have slightly different scripts; print and radio ads designed to reach older Latinos have a different emphasis than digital commercials. And some ads aimed at Latinos aren’t in Spanish at all. In Iowa, where the population skews toward more recent immigrants, the campaign largely spoke Spanish; on Spotify, where they’re aiming for young Latinos, many ads are entirely in English.

Because Rocha’s own Spanish is “horrible,” he mainly relies on a 30-year-old undocumented immigrant named Luis Alcauter to design and write them. (Sanders speaks the language haltingly; Rocha told The Hill that he discourages his Anglo clients from using Spanish on the trail “because it normally does not go well.”) Rocha describes Alcauter as his “right-hand man.” He may also be the brash Rocha’s polar opposite: a soft-spoken Mormon who came to California’s Central Valley from Mexico as a teenager.

“It’s an incredible opportunity and a lot of responsibility to make sure that I represent my community and I talk to them and they’re able to understand,” Alcauter told Yahoo News.

Alcauter and the other Latinos on Sanders’s team aren’t just helping with campaigning. They’ve also influenced policy and helped craft Sanders’s immigration platform.

“We care about the issue, and it affects our lives,” said Alcauter. “So we wanted to make sure that we gather together, we put our minds together and we work on something that we're going to be proud of.”

It’s a clear example of one of Rocha’s core beliefs — that minority outreach work should be fully integrated into larger operations.

“We do all of this without a Latino department,” Rocha explained. “I was sick and tired of Latinos being window dressings for campaigns ... of seeing Latino outreach programs that were siloed off, underfunded, understaffed and never listened to.”

According to Belén Sisa, another undocumented staffer, this integration is emblematic of Sanders’s approach to politics.

“It shows what a Bernie Sanders presidency will be,” Sisa told Yahoo News. “It will be the people who were in the frontlines fighting for these things for years who are going to be putting together the solutions.”

Besides advertising, the Sanders campaign is reaching out to Latino voters personally. Bilingual staffers and volunteers are deployed to voters’ homes and have mailed out handwritten notes. Rocha has used databases to identify phone numbers that likely belong to Latinos to receive bilingual texts.

Over the past eight months, Sanders’s Nevada campaign hosted a slew of community events while also dispatching its massive volunteer army to knock on doors around the state. The day before the caucuses, the Sanders campaign announced that it had visited 500,000 homes in the state.

Jose Mariscal-Cruz, a 23-year-old Mexican-American from Reno, told Yahoo News that he made at least 2,000 of those visits. He took a year off from college to work as a field organizer for the Sanders campaign in Las Vegas. On Monday, Yahoo News followed Mariscal-Cruz as he campaigned among the colorfully painted bungalows in the heavily Latino neighborhood of East Las Vegas. He was accompanied by José La Luz, a prominent Puerto Rican labor activist from New York who served as a surrogate for Sanders in Nevada ahead of the caucus. The pair visited about 40 homes to deliver their fluent, finely tuned message to potential voters.

At two of the homes, Spanish-speaking elderly residents indicated that they were from Guanajuato in Mexico. Mariscal-Cruz rattled off his own family ties to the region, and La Luz piped in with a few lines from a ballad about the area by the famed Mexican singer Pedro Infante. The song brought a smile from a woman named Maria who said she and her husband had already voted for Sanders.

“We have a lot of faith,” Maria said.

“With faith, we can move mountains, God willing,” La Luz replied. “We know that the vote of our people is the vote that will be the difference.”

The Sanders campaign has already set up similar ground operations in California and beyond. During a debate watch party Wednesday at Sanders’s East Los Angeles field office, L.A. County Area Director Daniel Andalon and L.A. County Area Field Director Lewis Myers stepped outside to discuss how the operation in America’s most Latino metropolis has expanded over the last eight months.

“I get goosebumps just thinking about it,” said Andalon, a longtime operative who managed Hilda Solis’s winning 2014 campaign for county supervisor. “In the summer it was just us. We were meeting at McDonald’s and Denny’s and working out of our homes, much to our wives’ chagrin.”

According to Andalon, “Sanders has not spared any expense here.” That means opening four offices in L.A. County alone — including East Los Angeles, where the population is more than 96 percent Latino.

“We’ve knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and made millions of phone calls out of this office,” Myers explained. “Last weekend we knocked on 62,000 doors. The weekend before that was 58,000 doors.”

As a result, Andalon said, “we’ve been able to broaden Bernie’s base to include “a lot more brown faces.”

Both Andalon and Myers said they haven’t seen their rivals competing for Latino votes in the area, with less than two weeks until the vote.

“There is no one who is running a program this robust,” Andalon said.

For Sanders, the hope is that California as a whole is a similar story to Nevada. The campaign is the largest in the field, with 105 staffers and 22 offices statewide — “most of them,” according to California State Director Rafael Návar, “in heavily Latino communities,” with “more in the [blue-collar] Central Valley than any other region.” Sanders’s own travel to the state has followed a similar pattern. According to a tally compiled by the Sacramento Bee, Sanders has held far more public events (37) in the state than any other candidate.

“Bernie came to Coachella for an office opening — a place no presidential candidate has come to since JFK,” Návar told Yahoo News. “That’s just not a place you have a presence usually. We’re in every congressional district and we’re playing for every delegate in the state. We’re not just focused on the urban hubs.”

In 2016, Sanders hoped to make a last stand against Clinton in California’s June primary, but he lost by more than a dozen points in part because she trounced him in the state’s top Latino areas. Sanders’s team also wasn’t sophisticated enough to focus its efforts on the less-populated, less-contested inland areas where they could claim a disproportionate number of delegates, some of which are awarded by congressional district. Ultimately, Sanders carried just eight of California’s 53 districts, allowing Clinton to widen her delegate lead and clinch the nomination. But Návar insisted that “having that experience means we have a lot stronger strategy than in the past.

“In 2016, we weren’t here until a month before the election. This time we’ve been very strategic about where we’ve homed in and are building up our base,” he said.

And Sanders’s campaign isn’t just courting Latinos in states like California and Nevada. Latinos make up just about 6 percent of the population in Iowa, which was the first state to vote in caucuses on Feb. 3. Still, Rocha mounted a Latino outreach effort there. According to a report from the UCLA Latino Politics and Policy Initiative, Sanders won a majority of the vote at Iowa’s high-density Latino caucus locations. That edge helped Sanders win more votes than anyone else in the crucial first state.

Rocha said the results in Iowa helped soothe skeptics of the campaign and gave him “some job security” by demonstrating that the campaign had not “spent all this money for nothing.” Rocha and his team plan to continue targeting smaller Latino populations in other key states, such as Wisconsin.

For Rocha and the other Latinos on his team — particularly the undocumented immigrants — the effort is deeply meaningful. Over lunch at a Mexican café in East Las Vegas, Sisa said the experience was beyond her “wildest dreams” — an opportunity to make the case that “immigrants deserve better, regardless of being documented or not.”

“I think no one [else] has been bold enough to say, ‘You may be undocumented, but you deserve health care,’” Sisa said. “‘You may be undocumented, but you deserve tuition-free college’ — because we all deserve those things.”

With his decisions to limit legal migration, end the DACA program and separate undocumented immigrants from their children, President Trump loomed large over the conversation.

So, it turns out, did his plane. In keeping with his strategy to shadow the Democratic primary by holding rallies in each early voting state, Trump visited Las Vegas during caucus week. As Alcauter left the café, he pointed to the sky.

“Look,” he said. “It’s Air Force One.”

As an undocumented immigrant, Alcauter said he believes Trump “from day one has been fighting against me.” But if the campaign is successful, Alcauter could go from feeling targeted by the president to being on his staff and taking flight with Sanders on Air Force One.

“I definitely dream about it,” Alcauter said. “That’s the reason we’re doing the work we’re doing.”

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#super tuesday #bernie sanders #bernie sander for president #bernie 2020 #2020 presidential election #2020 candidates #2020 election #politics and government #political science #us politics #politics #justice democrats #democratic party #democrats #u.s. presidential elections #u.s. news #election security #latino #minorities

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patriotsnet · 4 years ago

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What Will Happen If Republicans Win

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-will-happen-if-republicans-win/

What Will Happen If Republicans Win

So How Can Republicans Win Without Texas

Lets take the 2016 map with Texas flipped as a starting point. Republicans were at 268 Electoral College votes, meaning that they would only need to flip one Democratic state to win the election. The simplest way to do that would be to target states like Minnesota , the only midwestern state the Republicans failed to pick up in 2016, minus solid blue Illinois. Lets flip Minnesota and see how the map looks then.

This is one way in which Republicans can win an election without Texas. The ten extra Electoral College votes from Minnesota push the Republicans to a victory, albeit by a small margin but a victory nonetheless. Of course, this begs the question, how realistic is this map? Well, Minnesota was by no means a comfortable victory for the Democrats in 2016; Clinton won the state by just one-and-a-half points or roughly 44,000 votes out of a total of 2.7 million votes cast. Its not unrealistic to think that, with some extra effort in campaigning, Republicans could flip the North Star State.

Republicans could also target Nevada , which was ranked as a lean-Democrat/battleground state in 2016. Clinton eventually won Nevada and its six Electoral College votes, but only by a margin of around 30,000 from just over a million cast. Heres how that map would look.

A smaller margin than if the Republicans flipped Minnesota, but a victory nonetheless.

All maps courtesy of 270towin.com

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What If The Republicans Win Everything Again

Total victory for the G.O.P. would mean Trump unleashed.

Opinion Columnist

The end of Robert Muellers investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump.

These are among the plausible consequences if the Republicans sweep the midterm elections and keep control of both the House and Senate. And dont fool yourself. That outcome, although not the most likely one, remains possible. The last couple of weeks of polling have shown how it could happen.

Voters who lean Republican including whites across the South could set aside their disappointment with Trump and vote for Republican congressional candidates. Voters who lean left including Latinos and younger adults could turn out in low numbers, as they usually do in midterm elections. The Republicans continuing efforts to suppress turnout could also swing a few close elections.

No matter what, Democrats will probably win the popular vote in the House elections, for the first time since 2012. Trump, after all, remains unpopular. But the combination of gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in major cities means that a popular-vote win wont automatically translate into a House majority.

A Division Of Power In Government Is Common In The Us With The Republicans And The Democrats Often Splitting Control Of The White House And Congress

Joe Biden may have been announced as President Elect but there are still some crucial decisions to be made on how America will be governed for the next four years. The presidential election appears to have been a pretty resounding win for the Democrats but the picture is less clear in the Senate, when both parties retain hope of having a majority when the Upper House reconvenes next year.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement after Bidens victory was called, saying: “A Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate would be the biggest difference maker to help President-elect Biden deliver for working families across the country.

Sen. Chuck Schumer: “There has been no evidence of any significant or widespread voter fraud. Joe Biden won this election fair and square. The margins of his victory are growing by the day.” pic.twitter.com/bvAFNdVAw5

The Hill November 9, 2020

All elections in Georgia, not just those for the Senate, require the winning candidate to pick up over 50% of the votes cast. This year neither of the states two Senate races had a majority winning so a run-off will be held on 5 January, with both the Democrats and the Republicans holding out hope of securing the vital seats needed to give them a majority in the Senate.

Why is control of the Senate so important?

How would a Republican Senate affect a Biden presidency?

How likely is it that a Republican Senate compromises with President Elect Biden?

What If Republicans Win The Midterms

March 3, 2018

WASHINGTON A sizable portion of the American population has been convulsing with outrage at President Trump for more than a year. Millions of people who previously took only mild interest in politics have participated in protests, fumed as they stayed riveted to news out of Washington and filled social media accounts once devoted to family updates and funny videos with furious political commentary.

Yet public life on the whole has remained surprisingly calm. A significant factor in keeping the peace has surely been anticipatory catharsis: The widespread expectations of a big Democratic wave in the coming midterm elections are containing and channeling that indignation, helping to maintain order.

What will happen if no such wave materializes and that pressure-relief valve jams shut?

The country was already badly polarized before the plot twist of election night in 2016, of course, but since then liberals and much of what remains of Americas moderate center have been seething in a way that dwarfs the usual disgruntlement of whichever faction is out of power. While nobody can know for sure whether Mr. Trump would have lost but for Russias meddling, many of his critics clearly choose to believe he is in the White House because Vladimir Putin tricked the United States into making him its leader.

This November, if the wave turns out to be a mere trickle, we could see the accomplishment of that goal take hold.

Gold If Republicans Win The Election

Oliver said if President Donald Trump pulls out a surprise victory in the election, the gold price could plunge, just as it did after the 2016 election. That happened against expectations.

While he denounced “left-wing populism,” he also said that Trump “has his own populist streak” because he likes high tariffs, cutting taxes, increasing spending and “a central bank that prints to fund internal improvements and a rising stock market.”

“The precious metals offer safe haven from the approaching political and economic turbulence,” Oliver wrote. “After a relatively brief correction, gold and silver have resumed their climb.”

He added that if the market demands that the dollar be backed on-third by gold like it was between the 1690s and the `908s, gold would need to trade at $8,927 an ounce. On the other hand, if the Federal Reserve is forced to back its liabilities by two-thirds, which he said would be more appropriate for a crisis, the gold price would have to rise to $17,854 an ounce. Further, as the Fed’s balance sheet grows, these numbers for the gold price will increase.

“Given the economic and political risks, $1,900/oz is a bargain,” he declared.”

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Reality Check 1: Biden Cant Be Fdr

Theres no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of social democracy prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?

But the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Democrats losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. The Senate is 50-50.

Lessons Democrats Can Learn From The 2020 Elections

Why are the elections taking place now?

These are runoffs. Georgia does things a little differently than most other states. Back in November, if one of the Senate candidates had gotten 50% plus one vote, that candidate would have won the election outright and the state would have avoided a runoff in that race. But that didn’t happen in either contest.

Perdue came closest he won 49.7% of the vote to Ossoff’s 47.9%. Calculated another way, out of almost 5 million votes cast, Perdue missed avoiding a runoff by a little over 13,000 votes.

The Loeffler-Warnock race had another hurdle. Because it was a special election, there weren’t primaries and everyone ran on the same ballot together at once.

In a field of 20 candidates, including a prominent Republican challenger, Loeffler got just over a quarter of the vote.

Warnock actually finished ahead of her, with about a third of the vote. But when the votes were combined by party in that race, Republicans were narrowly ahead of Democrats, 49.4% to 48.4%.

Interest is high, given not just the money spent, but the high early-vote turnout, which began Dec. 14 and continued through Friday.

Column: What Happens If Republicans Win The Senate

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For most of the year, it seemed almost certain that Republicans would win the six additional U.S. Senate seats they need to oust the Democrats from their majority and take control of Congress.

But the outlook has turned murkier in recent weeks. While a GOP majority is still the most likely outcome, its no longer as sure a bet. Endangered Democratic incumbents in North Carolina and Alaska are waging surprisingly strong campaigns, and a Republican incumbent in Kansas is in unexpected trouble. We dont have a lock on this thing at all, one GOP strategist told me recently.

It even seems possible that Senate elections could end in a draw, with a 50-50 split, in which case Vice President Joe Biden would cast votes as a tiebreaker.

And thats not even the most exotic possibility.

One scenario is a Senate in which neither major party wins 50 seats. The next Senate will include two, maybe three independents. Incumbents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, whose seats arent up this year, may be joined by Greg Orman, a newcomer who leads the polls in Kansas. Sanders, a socialist, would continue to vote with Democrats, but King and Orman, both centrists, would be wooed by both parties and could instantly become two of the most powerful politicians on Capitol Hill.

But the most intriguing scenario for next years Senate, paradoxically, is the least exotic one: What happens if Republicans win a slim majority of 51 or 52 seats?

More Tax Cuts For The Wealthy And Further Spending Cuts For Middle

Most legislation needs 60 votes in order to break a filibuster in the Senate, but a congressional budget resolution can establish parameters for subsequent legislation to be enacted through the reconciliation process, which only requires 51 votes to pass a measure. The budget resolution itself cannot be filibustered and also only requires 51 votes to pass the Senate. As a result, it is easier for the majority to pass a budget resolution and a reconciliation bill than most other legislation.

The current conservative economic and fiscal roadmap is the fiscal year 2015 budget put forward by former vice presidential nominee and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan . The Ryan budget would provide those with incomes of at least $1 million another $200,000 per year in tax cuts while cutting nondefense spending by $4.8 trillion. Roughly $3.3 trillion of those cuts, or nearly 70 percent, target programs that help low-income and middle-class families, such as Medicaidwhich provides health coverage for low- and moderate-income familiesand Pell Grants, which help students pay for college.

When given the opportunity, Senate Republicans voted for the various Ryan budgets in 2011, 2012, and again in 2013. Previous Senate Republican actions make it clear that the budget that would result from a Republican majority would most likely feature many of the same components as Rep. Ryans past budgets.

Here Is What’s In The Covid

What does the early voting tell us?

It’s always a little tricky to interpret early-voting data and ascribe real meaning to it, but Democrats see some hopeful signs.

Three million people cast ballots early. That’s a record already for total votes cast in a Georgia runoff election. And who is voting is what’s giving Democrats optimism: Black voters are making up a higher percentage of voters than they did for the Senate races in November, and turnout in Democratic congressional districts is higher than in GOP-held ones.

Of course, Democrats saw hope in early-voting numbers in Texas before Nov. 3, and Trump wound up winning that state by 6 points, a wider margin than the polls had predicted.

How much money has been spent on the races?

Almost $500 million has been spent on advertising between the two races in just the two months since the presidential election, according to the latest numbers provided to NPR by AdImpact, a political ad-tracking firm. The figures measure ad reservations between Nov. 4 and Jan. 5.

With outside groups included, Republicans have outspent Democrats $271 million to $218 million.

What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse To Certify Democratic Wins

Its something we need to start preparing for now.

What will the institutions of liberal democracy do when Republican officials simply refuse to concede Democratic victories? The question isnt as far-fetched as it may seem, and the reckoning may be coming far sooner than most expect.

The entire left-leaning political world has spent the months after the 2020 election obsessed over the fairness of elections, and conservative attempts to rig the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression. This is for good reason, of course: Republicans know they lack the support to win majority support in a fair contest, but believe they have the right to rule nonetheless for reasons that ultimately boil down to white supremacy, religious dominionism and antiquated patriarchal beliefs. So Republicans have been busy passing bills to restrict voting among young people and non-whites, while doing their best to ensure that exurban conservative whites continue to be dramatically and unfairly overrepresented in the House, Senate and Electoral College.

Its hard to overstate how dangerous this is, and what its consequences might entail in the very near future. As Greg Sargent notes, the GOP appears to be plunging headlong into a level of full-blown hostility to democracy that has deeply unsettling future ramifications.

And no, thats not an exaggeration. Everything were seeing from the Republican Party is pointing directly to it in 2024.

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A Vote To Repeal The Affordable Care Act

Senate Republicans have indicated one of their first votes, should they be in the majority, would be to repeal the ACA. This would most likely occur during the first months of 2015, the same time that millions of Americans will be shopping in the state and federal marketplaces to sign up for health coverage.

Moreover, Senate Republicans would be voting to repeal the ACA when the law is working: The uninsured rate has dropped to a record low, according to a Gallup poll: 7.3 million people were enrolled and paying their premiums in the marketplaces as of August, and another 8 million people have health coverage through Medicaid, not to mention the 5 million people who signed up for ACA-compliant plans outside the marketplace. In addition, millions of Americans benefit from the consumer protections that ban insurers from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition and from putting both lifetime and annual coverage limits on their care.

For some reason, congressional Republicans want to return to old political fights at a time when the rest of the country is ready to move forward. Having a substantive debate on how to improve the ACA and the nations health care system is one thing. Scoring political points on a law that is delivering for Americans is another.

What To Watch For

Activists and a number of Democrats have been heavily pressuring left-leaning Justice Stephen Breyer to retire while Democrats still have the power to confirm Bidens chosen nominee without Republican interference. While control of the Senate will next be determined through the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats have urged Breyer to act sooner, as Democrats slim majority in the Senate50 votes plus Vice President Kamala Harris as a tie breakermeans the party could lose their majority sooner, should one Democratic senator become incapacitated or unexpectedly have to step down. Breyer, for his part, has so far given no indication that he plans to imminently retire, and has spoken out against the idea of the Supreme Court being subject to political interferenceeven soon publishing a book on the topic and how judges try to avoid considerations of politics.

How Challenges To States Electors Will Work

For a challenge to proceed, at least one lawmaker from each chamber must object to a states electors. More than two dozen House Republicans have said they will try to challenge results, and a dozen GOP senators will join them even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has urged senators to stay away from this.

Lawmakers dont have to give a detailed explanation of why they object; they just object in writing, which Pence will read out loud.

If theres an objection to a states electors raised by both a House and Senate lawmaker, the chambers have to split up and vote on that objection. Most of this will be done silently, save for Pence reading out loud the objections.

They have up to two hours to debate each one. That means there will be simultaneous debates in the House and Senate. We expect congressional leaders in both chambers to move to put down the challenges as quickly as possible. In the House, Pelosi will let lawmakers from the states being challenged do the speaking on the Democratic side.

What If The 2020 Election Audits Show Trump Really Won

We just don’t know. We just don’t know what comes next. It is all a calculated guess. The US Constitution is silent. Even if, if, if, it is so very clear through professional forensic election audit results, that the presidential election of 2020 was stolen and President Trump actually won, there appears to be no obvious remedy stated in the US Constitution to right this wrong. We just don’t know.

The Founding Fathers did not write up a “what if” in the Constitution to make things right. The Founding Fathers wrote up nothing in the Constitution in case mail-in ballots or the internet were used to manipulate the vote. The scary part is that since the answer to possible election fraud appears not to be in the Constitution, nor in federal law, nor in federal court cases, then the answer-the remedy will come from somewhere else. That somewhere else, we know not. But probably not from the words within the US Constitution. Much of this is conjecture.

I. This we do know…

* With a strict constructionist view of the wording in the Constitution, the words are not there to “road map” how to fix possible presidential election fraud.

* The Constitution mentions nothing about the Electoral College re-convening. Historically, the Electoral College has never re-convened for a second time for a presidential certification.

* We know that President Trump is planning something very big and important this summer, and America might look and feel very different by Labor Day Weekend.

Texas Republican Suggests Civil War Will Happen If Democrats Win Georgia Senate Runoffs

As voters in Georgia go to the polls today in a runoff election that will decide who represents them in the U.S. Senate, a Texas Republican suggested Monday evening that if Democrats win those races, conservatives might just declare civil war.

During an appearance on Fox News, Rep. Chip Roy told host Tucker Carlson:

Heres the thing. What happens tomorrow in Georgia if we have a Democratically controlled Senate, I mean, were now basically at full-scale hot conflict in this country, whereas right now were in a cold civil war. Weve got a major problem in this country where the American people, the regular people out there that are working every day, hardworking Americans, they are getting trampled by a system that is rigged against them.

The system is rigged against them? Well, Donald Trump is currently the president and Republicans control the Senate, so wouldnt that mean the rigged system is being perpetuated by those in power, i.e. the GOP?

But that wasnt all Roy had to say. He added:

That is what is at stake, and if the American people in Georgia dont show up, if Georgians dont show up and ensure that we hold the Senate in Republican hands, then thats whats happening. Two additional votes coming out of the Senate in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, they lock it down for good.

i uh..i think a republican member of congress just threatened civil war if the dems win in georgia tomorrow pic.twitter.com/yZhwB75Up1

Andrew Lawrence January 5, 2021

Weakening Of The Investigations Against Trump

If Democrats dont control the House or the Senate, they cant initiate investigations of Trump or some of his more controversial cabinet members, such as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

More importantly, after the 2018 elections, the electoral process will recede as a constraint on the president and GOP in terms of the Russia investigation at least for a while.

We dont really know why Trump, despite his constant criticisms of the investigation, has not fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, or why he has not directly tried to stop the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller. Maybe Trump, despite his rhetoric, has some real respect for the rule of law. I think its more likely that Trump understands that firing Rosenstein or making a drastic move to stop the Mueller probe would increase both the chances of Democrats winning the House and/or Senate this year, and the odds that the resulting Democratic-led chamber would feel compelled to push to impeach Trump. But if the GOP emerges from 2017 and 2018 without losing control of the House or the Senate, I suspect that, with the next election two years away, the president will feel freer to take controversial steps to end the Russia probe. And I doubt Republicans on Capitol Hill would try to stop him.

What Congress Is Doing On Wednesday

Throughout November and December, states certified their results. Then the electoral college voted Dec. 14 based on those results and made Biden the winner. States sent their electoral college vote totals to the new Congress to be counted and confirmed. This counting will happen on Wednesday. Its largely a formality, since election law says Congress has to treat states results completed by the safe harbor deadline of Dec. 8 as conclusive.

Wednesday is the penultimate step in the post-election process. All thats left after that is to inaugurate Biden.

I Do Not Buy That A Social Media Ban Hurts Trumps 2024 Aspirations: Nate Silver

sarah: Yeah, Democrats might not have their worst Senate map in 2022, but it will by no means be easy, and how they fare will have a lot to do with the national environment. And as we touched on earlier, Bidens overall approval rating will also make a big difference in Democrats midterm chances.

nrakich: Yeah, if the national environment is even a bit Republican-leaning, that could be enough to allow solid Republican recruits to flip even Nevada and New Hampshire. And then it wouldnt even matter if Democrats win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

One thing is for sure, though whichever party wins the Senate will have only a narrow majority, so I think were stuck in this era of moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski controlling every bills fate for at least a while longer.

sarah: Lets talk about big picture strategy, then, and where that leaves us moving forward. Its still early and far too easy to prescribe election narratives that arent grounded in anything, but one gambit the Republican Party seems to be making at this point is that attacking the Democratic Party for being too progressive or woke will help them win.

What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?

With that being said, the GOPs strategies could still gin up turnout among its base, in particular, but its hard to separate that from general dissatisfaction with Biden.

0 notes

statetalks · 4 years ago

Text

What Will Happen If Republicans Win

So How Can Republicans Win Without Texas

youtube

A smaller margin than if the Republicans flipped Minnesota, but a victory nonetheless.

All maps courtesy of 270towin.com

TAGS

What If The Republicans Win Everything Again

Total victory for the G.O.P. would mean Trump unleashed.

Opinion Columnist

A Division Of Power In Government Is Common In The Us With The Republicans And The Democrats Often Splitting Control Of The White House And Congress

The Hill November 9, 2020

Why is control of the Senate so important?

How would a Republican Senate affect a Biden presidency?

How likely is it that a Republican Senate compromises with President Elect Biden?

What If Republicans Win The Midterms

March 3, 2018

What will happen if no such wave materializes and that pressure-relief valve jams shut?

This November, if the wave turns out to be a mere trickle, we could see the accomplishment of that goal take hold.

Gold If Republicans Win The Election

Oliver said if President Donald Trump pulls out a surprise victory in the election, the gold price could plunge, just as it did after the 2016 election. That happened against expectations.

“The precious metals offer safe haven from the approaching political and economic turbulence,” Oliver wrote. “After a relatively brief correction, gold and silver have resumed their climb.”

“Given the economic and political risks, $1,900/oz is a bargain,” he declared.”

TAGS

Reality Check 1: Biden Cant Be Fdr

Lessons Democrats Can Learn From The 2020 Elections

Why are the elections taking place now?

Perdue came closest he won 49.7% of the vote to Ossoff’s 47.9%. Calculated another way, out of almost 5 million votes cast, Perdue missed avoiding a runoff by a little over 13,000 votes.

The Loeffler-Warnock race had another hurdle. Because it was a special election, there weren’t primaries and everyone ran on the same ballot together at once.

In a field of 20 candidates, including a prominent Republican challenger, Loeffler got just over a quarter of the vote.

Warnock actually finished ahead of her, with about a third of the vote. But when the votes were combined by party in that race, Republicans were narrowly ahead of Democrats, 49.4% to 48.4%.

Interest is high, given not just the money spent, but the high early-vote turnout, which began Dec. 14 and continued through Friday.

Column: What Happens If Republicans Win The Senate

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For most of the year, it seemed almost certain that Republicans would win the six additional U.S. Senate seats they need to oust the Democrats from their majority and take control of Congress.

It even seems possible that Senate elections could end in a draw, with a 50-50 split, in which case Vice President Joe Biden would cast votes as a tiebreaker.

And thats not even the most exotic possibility.

But the most intriguing scenario for next years Senate, paradoxically, is the least exotic one: What happens if Republicans win a slim majority of 51 or 52 seats?

More Tax Cuts For The Wealthy And Further Spending Cuts For Middle

youtube

Here Is What’s In The Covid

What does the early voting tell us?

It’s always a little tricky to interpret early-voting data and ascribe real meaning to it, but Democrats see some hopeful signs.

Of course, Democrats saw hope in early-voting numbers in Texas before Nov. 3, and Trump wound up winning that state by 6 points, a wider margin than the polls had predicted.

How much money has been spent on the races?

With outside groups included, Republicans have outspent Democrats $271 million to $218 million.

What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse To Certify Democratic Wins

Its something we need to start preparing for now.

And no, thats not an exaggeration. Everything were seeing from the Republican Party is pointing directly to it in 2024.

Support Nonprofit Journalism

A Vote To Repeal The Affordable Care Act

What To Watch For

How Challenges To States Electors Will Work

Lawmakers dont have to give a detailed explanation of why they object; they just object in writing, which Pence will read out loud.

What If The 2020 Election Audits Show Trump Really Won

I. This we do know…

* With a strict constructionist view of the wording in the Constitution, the words are not there to “road map” how to fix possible presidential election fraud.

* The Constitution mentions nothing about the Electoral College re-convening. Historically, the Electoral College has never re-convened for a second time for a presidential certification.

* We know that President Trump is planning something very big and important this summer, and America might look and feel very different by Labor Day Weekend.

Texas Republican Suggests Civil War Will Happen If Democrats Win Georgia Senate Runoffs

During an appearance on Fox News, Rep. Chip Roy told host Tucker Carlson:

But that wasnt all Roy had to say. He added:

i uh..i think a republican member of congress just threatened civil war if the dems win in georgia tomorrow pic.twitter.com/yZhwB75Up1

Andrew Lawrence January 5, 2021

Weakening Of The Investigations Against Trump

youtube

More importantly, after the 2018 elections, the electoral process will recede as a constraint on the president and GOP in terms of the Russia investigation at least for a while.

What Congress Is Doing On Wednesday

Wednesday is the penultimate step in the post-election process. All thats left after that is to inaugurate Biden.

I Do Not Buy That A Social Media Ban Hurts Trumps 2024 Aspirations: Nate Silver

What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?

With that being said, the GOPs strategies could still gin up turnout among its base, in particular, but its hard to separate that from general dissatisfaction with Biden.

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-will-happen-if-republicans-win/

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Republicans struggled with setting debate criteria during the 2016 presidential election because of their large and unwieldy field, and Democrats seem as though they’ll have their own issues in 2020. We already count 20 candidates who have qualified for the first two debates via one of the two criteria the Democratic National Committee has set up: receiving at least 1 percent in at least three qualifying polls or having 65,000 people donate to their campaign, with at least 200 donors in 20 different states.

The DNC has said that it will cap participation at 20 candidates, so the next candidate who qualifies, via one of the two criteria for entry, will trigger the tiebreaker rules. Those get complicated fast, but the topline is: If more than 20 candidates qualify, then meeting both the polling and donor requirements will be paramount for candidates — those who do will get first dibs on debate lecterns.

But why is it so hard to figure out a fair metric for inclusion? Is there a better way to determine who makes the debate stage?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): It’s difficult to figure out a fair metric for inclusion because the whole process is weird. Ideally, it’s both inclusive and efficient (i.e., it narrows options for a nominee relatively quickly), but it’s not really possible to do both at the same time.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Right, and in the aftermath of the 2016 Democratic nomination, when the DNC was criticized for “rigging” the debates for Hillary Clinton, the DNC really wants to seem transparent and inclusive.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): So, 1) It’s good to have objective criteria, 2) as objective criteria go, fundraising and high-quality polling is perfectly fine, but 3) the DNC set the bar too low. Getting donations from 65,000 people is not that hard. And polling at 1 percent in any of three polls out of the many, many polls out there is even easier, probably.

sarahf: Although, to be clear, the DNC is not counting all polls from all pollsters. It has said, however, that it’ll consider both national and early-state polls, and qualifying polls can come from 18 different organizations).

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, it’s still pretty easy to qualify via three polls at 1 percent or more — 19 Democrats have already done that. However, if the DNC had set the threshold at 2 percent or more, just eight candidates would meet that mark.

Only 8 candidates are polling at 2 percent or more

Democratic presidential candidates by whether they have received at least 1 percent or 2 percent support in at least three polls that would qualify them for the first Democratic presidential debates, as of May 21, 2019

IN at least 3 DEBATE-QUALIFYING POLLS, HAS SUPPORT OF … Candidate 1 percent or more 2 percent or more Joe Biden ✓ ✓ Cory Booker ✓ ✓ Pete Buttigieg ✓ ✓ Kamala Harris ✓ ✓ Amy Klobuchar ✓ ✓ Beto O’Rourke ✓ ✓ Bernie Sanders ✓ ✓ Elizabeth Warren ✓ ✓ Steve Bullock ✓ Julian Castro ✓ Bill de Blasio ✓ John Delaney ✓ Tulsi Gabbard ✓ Kirsten Gillibrand ✓ John Hickenlooper ✓ Jay Inslee ✓ Tim Ryan ✓ Eric Swalwell ✓ Andrew Yang ✓ Michael Bennet Seth Moulton Marianne Williamson

For candidates deemed “major” by FiveThirtyEight.

Sources: Polls, Media reports

natesilver: Yeah, hitting 1 percent is soooooooooo easy. Like people can literally just pick your name at random almost.

The DNC is spending too much time trying to avoid mistakes they think were made in the previous Democratic nomination process when there are probably more lessons to be learned from the Republican nomination process.

geoffrey.skelley: Well, part of what the DNC wanted to avoid was the mistakes the Republicans made in the 2016 cycle with prime time and undercard debates.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I think the Democrats have already done a better job than Republicans did in 2016. The DNC has said that they’ll randomly distribute candidates across the nights, rather than hold “varsity” and “junior varsity” debates. I think that’s a good move.

natesilver: Oh, I’m not sure I agree with that, Nathaniel.

nrakich: How is a junior varsity debate better, Nate? My problem with splitting the candidates up by tier is that it requires splitting hairs between a candidate who gets, say, 3 percent in a poll and a candidate who gets 4 percent. (Margins of error are real!) I guess it’s fine to argue that you think the threshold should be higher and there should be only one main debate, but if you are going to split the candidates into two debates, I think randomly doing it is the only good way.

natesilver: Well, if you wind up stuck in the JV debate because you poll at 2 percent rather than at 3 percent, I don’t have much sympathy for you, even though that’s a minor difference.

nrakich: But the debates are candidates’ chance to raise their polling numbers up from that 2 or 3 percent.

Debates should start off inclusive but probably get less inclusive as we get closer to voting.

Like, the New Hampshire debate three days before the primary should probably only have the candidates with a serious chance of winning that primary.

nrakich: My beef with using polling averages as a debate criterion is that they assume that candidates can be precisely ranked by their standing in the polls. But in reality, polls are imprecise instruments, and you can’t do much more than lump candidates into rough categories (and even those have fuzzy boundaries). For example, all candidates polling between 0 and 5 percent are basically in the same spot.

julia_azari: I agree with Nathaniel here. I would also add that these differences don’t, in my mind, clearly differentiate candidates. And does it really matter if it’s 20 or 22 candidates on the stage? Either isolate the top-tier candidates or let everyone in.

sarahf: Julia, the number of evenings we have to devote to watching the debates is at stake!

julia_azari: If other people haven’t blocked off all of 2019 and 2020 to watch debates, that’s not my problem. People want an open nomination process. This is where that goes.

nrakich: Some pollsters have also said that they are uncomfortable with their work influencing elections. Their role is as measurers, not active participants.

natesilver: Meh, the pollsters complain too much.

If you believe in the quality of your poll, you shouldn’t have any problem with it being used as an objective metric.

I think they should literally have tiers on stage based on where you’re polling.

nrakich: Nate

take

natesilver: So like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are on the top tier and have big giant podiums. And Swalwell is in the cheap seats in like a broom closet.

julia_azari: This chat is a serious warning about overpopulated debates, and there are only five of us.

natesilver: I do think for this first debate, they might as well just let everyone in. And then set the criteria a lot higher for future debates.

geoffrey.skelley: But the polling average tiebreaker might not even solve things. Say there are a few candidates who have a bunch of polls in which they are hitting only 1 percent. If the polling average can’t settle a tie, it comes down to the number of qualifying polls a candidate has. But what if three or four candidates have the same number of qualifying polls? It’s going to be a mess one way or the other.

natesilver: Again, though, I’m realllllllly not sympathetic to the borderline cases. The primary has been underway for a while now, and if you can’t both get 65,000 donors AND poll at 1 percent in three polls, there’s probably something pretty wrong with you.

And I’d rather give more time to, say, Cory Booker or Amy Klobuchar to make their cases and less to Eric Swalwell or Bill de Blasio.

julia_azari: This is a recurring problem for parties. They try to solve a lot of these problems informally by limiting who runs.But when these conversations break down like they did in 2016, the formal solutions — like trying to come up with a fair threshold for inclusion in a debate with so many candidates — show why those problems were being solved informally: It’s a mess.

natesilver: Do we think the debate rules factored into how many candidates have decided to run?

Mike Gravel, whom we don’t consider a major candidate yet, explicitly seems to have run based on the possibility that he’d get 65,000 donors and therefore some sort of platform to talk about U.S. imperialism or whatever.

nrakich: Good question. Probably not? There are other ways to get media attention aside from the debates — it looks like every candidate is getting a CNN town hall, for example. And a few candidates have jumped in so late that it’s not clear whether they’ll make the debates at all, like Seth Moulton and Michael Bennet. So why are they running?

geoffrey.skelley: I don’t know — it could have pushed a few candidates who were on the fence.

julia_azari: That’s hard to know, but what’s interesting to me is that not that long ago, debates were mostly about getting the top-tier candidates to show up. Now, even though the evidence that they matter is somewhat mixed, they’ve taken on this whole different significance because of the record number of candidates and the scramble for inclusion.

sarahf: So what good are debates, Julia, especially this far out?

julia_azari: Well, the default position in political science tends to be that not that many people are watching and that those who are have already made up their minds. But the latter point is a bit different for a primary debate, since partisanship doesn’t shape decisions in the same way.

sarahf: Right, here at FiveThirtyEight, we’ve been saying things won’t get interesting until the debates!

julia_azari: So on the one hand, there’s not really hard evidence that debates affect who wins the primary. (Studies do suggest that debates might affect citizens’ perceptions of personality and viability to win the nomination.) But usually the primary is … not that competitive. The 2008 Democratic primary really stood out in this regard, because there were two strong contenders through most of the primary season, making the contest a real competition.

sarahf: Yeah, I think the debates will stand out this year, too, as they’ll be one of the first opportunities for people to get to hear from the candidates directly (outside of a CNN town hall, which, as FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone has noted, can be overly orchestrated to begin with).

geoffrey.skelley: And primary debates can certainly make or break a candidate — earlier this year, I examined their effects. Rick Perry in the 2012 GOP primary debates really stands out to me because after he defended Texas’s in-state tuition policy for undocumented immigrants, his standing among Republicans plummeted. It was much worse than when he forgot the name of the third federal agency he wanted to dismantle!

nrakich: I feel like the debates are one of the events in the Olympic Games that are the primary season. You have to participate in them and be rated favorably by the judges (the media) in order to win gold.

natesilver: But quite a few people watch at least relative to the size of the Democratic electorate, don’t they?

Here’s some ratings data on the 2016 Democratic primaries from Wikipedia:

By comparison, 31 million people voted in the Democratic primaries in 2016. So having an audience of 16 million for the first debate isn’t bad compared with 31 million!

nrakich: It’s interesting how viewership dropped off so starkly after the first debate.

natesilver: That may have happened because I don’t think either Sanders or Clinton were particularly interesting debaters. They were perfectly competent, but not interesting.

sarahf: Do you think candidates who go the second night will be disadvantaged?

I realize Democrats aren’t splitting the debates into a varsity and JV debate, but maybe one debate will be enough for folks?

geoffrey.skelley: Depends on who is in each debate. If it’s a random draw but a number of leading candidates end up in one debate, that debate will probably get the most attention.

natesilver: There might be a wee bit of fatigue, Sarah, but it probably depends more on the draw. If Biden, Sanders and Warren are all on the second night, that’s the one most people will care about. But if the heavyweights are all on the first night, the second night could feel like more of a JV affair.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, but if the heavyweights are all grouped together, I think that could still be good for some of the underdog candidates. It could give them an opportunity to stand out without facing the same “main event” vs. “undercard” judgment that was explicit in how the GOP handled things in 2016.

julia_azari: I don’t know. I’m going to remain on team skepticism about 2016 Republican type ratings. It’s possible that people will tune into these debates with a genuine eye toward actually deciding between candidates or learning more about some candidates. But I don’t expect that these debates will draw in Trump-level ratings.

The Democratic field is crowded, but it doesn’t have an animating rivalry between two candidates and it’s not a clown show.

sarahf: … at least not yet!

There’s still so much we don’t know.

julia_azari: But people weren’t watching in 2016 because they wanted to hear the finer points of Marco Rubio’s tax plan vs. Ted Cruz’s. There was a show-biz factor with Trump, to put it politely. And he delivered consistently enough.

nrakich: I dunno, Julia, I’m pretty worked up about the Swalwell vs. Hickenlooper rivalry.

sarahf: Nathaniel

Is there another debate matchup you all are looking forward to?

natesilver: Trump was uniquely unpredictable in the context of the debates, so I’m not sure whether there will be a point of comparison.

But you will have the dynamic of other candidates working to take the front-runner down, which has both potential risks and rewards for the front-runner.

I think the first debate is probably more likely to hurt Biden than help him, however.

geoffrey.skelley: The lack of a Trump-like figure will certainly make a difference. But it could get really interesting if Biden and Sanders are on stage the same night. One could easily imagine Sanders going after Biden straight away, just as he did with Hillary Clinton in 2016.

natesilver: I mean, I think debates sometimes tend to cause reversion toward the fundamentals. So if we think Biden’s numbers are a little bit inflated right now by a post-announcement boost, and I think they probably are, he’s more likely to decline than improve.

julia_azari: Counterpoint: Biden is actually quite good in these settings. His experience helps as he’ll be less likely to go deer-in-the-headlights on a specific question. And he really knows how to work emotion, if you recall his performance in the 2008 VP debates.

natesilver: Who do we expect to be an effective debater? Kamala Harris? Elizabeth Warren? Pete Buttigieg?

Although, maybe it’s not a good thing if expectations are high. Everyone’s going to expect Harris to be super incisive with every response and for Buttigieg to speak Norwegian or something.

julia_azari: I am OUT if I have to learn Norwegian for these debates.

I think people expect Warren to be wonky and unlikable, but my impression is that she’s actually pretty good in front of a crowd, so maybe she’ll do well.

natesilver: For Warren, I think you can argue that she is someone for whom the fundamentals are misaligned. She’s an “objectively” strong candidate and “should” be doing better (I know how loaded those terms are — it’s a chat, so give me a break). Maybe the same is true for Harris. So they both stand to gain.

Or to put it another way, if Harris and Warren don’t benefit from the debates, then maybe we have to start concluding that they’re products that voters just don’t like very much for whatever reason.

sarahf: So who … do we think won’t make the debate stage? Because it does seem as though we’re headed toward some sort of tiebreaker, right?

nrakich: Maybe Marianne Williamson? She’s the only candidate currently who’s qualified via the donors criterion but not the polling criterion.

sarahf: If Marianne Williamson is the one who’s cut … it’s kind of like what was the point of the DNC introducing the 65,000-unique-donor threshold anyway.

geoffrey.skelley: But Williamson only needs to earn 1 percent support in one more survey to qualify via polls. So I actually like her chances if it comes down to a polling-average tiebreaker because she might hit both the polling and donor criteria.

And yeah, Sarah, that’s a big question mark: How many of the candidates who have qualified via polls but not via donors will actually get 65,000 donors?

It sounds like Inslee is close on the donor count, for instance. But what about John Hickenlooper or Kirsten Gillibrand or John Delaney, etc.? I haven’t found any new information about their donor counts.

natesilver: There’s no particular reason to limit it to 20 candidates instead of 21 or whatever.

nrakich: We live in a base 10 world, Nate. Get used to it.

natesilver: But it just sort of seems to defeat the purpose of being inclusive if you’re excluding just Williamson.

Moulton might not make it.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, Moulton is the one who is really up a creek without a polling paddle — he doesn’t have a single qualifying survey yet.

nrakich: The new hot take: I should be considered a serious candidate for president even though I have raised no money whatsoever.

natesilver: Sorry, but you’re not a major candidate according to our criteria, Rakich.

sarahf: OK, so as we’ve discussed, there are pros and cons to having a debate stage as wide-ranging and inclusive as what the DNC has settled on. But it’s also really hard to do any of this fairly. So to end today’s chat, what would you have liked to see the DNC do differently?

julia_azari: I mean, the DNC is in somewhat of a no-win position, but given that I’m not sure they can actually regain (or gain) legitimacy by having 20-candidate debates, it might have made sense to just raise the thresholds to begin with.

nrakich: Overall, I think the DNC did well. The criteria are arbitrary, sure, but they’ve turned out to be well-calibrated, at least for someone like me who wants initial debates to include (almost) everyone.

geoffrey.skelley: I think 10 Lincoln-Douglas debates between pairs of candidates would be the best approach.

Oh sorry, Newt Gingrich took over my Slack account for a second there.

But seriously, I think the DNC could’ve made a case for higher thresholds, such as polling at 2 percent instead of 1 percent.

nrakich: I think this chat did convince me that stricter thresholds are appropriate for later in the primary season, closer to the actual voting. We’ll see if the DNC agrees.

natesilver: I think maybe there should have been both a money qualifier and a donors qualifier for the donor threshold. Like, you have to raise donations from 65,000 people and raise at least $5 million, or something.

That’s basically what airlines’ frequent flier programs do now — you have to fly a certain amount of miles and spend a certain amount of money.

nrakich: The DNC should be more like airlines — there’s a winning electoral position!

natesilver: ThE AiRLiNe InDuStRy Is UnFaIrLy MaLiGnEd

julia_azari: This debate has been canceled due to mechanical failure. Tomorrow, we fly you to Poughkeepsie instead of Atlanta.

natesilver: And if I were the DNC, I’d stipulate my criteria for future debates sooner rather than later. Because otherwise it’s going to look like they’re engineering the rules around which candidates they do/don’t like.

geoffrey.skelley: Which would defeat the point of being so inclusive in the first place.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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patriotsnet · 4 years ago

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What Will Happen If Republicans Win

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-will-happen-if-republicans-win/

What Will Happen If Republicans Win

So How Can Republicans Win Without Texas

A smaller margin than if the Republicans flipped Minnesota, but a victory nonetheless.

All maps courtesy of 270towin.com

TAGS

What If The Republicans Win Everything Again

Total victory for the G.O.P. would mean Trump unleashed.

Opinion Columnist

A Division Of Power In Government Is Common In The Us With The Republicans And The Democrats Often Splitting Control Of The White House And Congress

The Hill November 9, 2020

Why is control of the Senate so important?

How would a Republican Senate affect a Biden presidency?

How likely is it that a Republican Senate compromises with President Elect Biden?

What If Republicans Win The Midterms

March 3, 2018

What will happen if no such wave materializes and that pressure-relief valve jams shut?

This November, if the wave turns out to be a mere trickle, we could see the accomplishment of that goal take hold.

Gold If Republicans Win The Election

Oliver said if President Donald Trump pulls out a surprise victory in the election, the gold price could plunge, just as it did after the 2016 election. That happened against expectations.

“The precious metals offer safe haven from the approaching political and economic turbulence,” Oliver wrote. “After a relatively brief correction, gold and silver have resumed their climb.”

“Given the economic and political risks, $1,900/oz is a bargain,” he declared.”

TAGS

Reality Check 1: Biden Cant Be Fdr

Lessons Democrats Can Learn From The 2020 Elections

Why are the elections taking place now?

Perdue came closest he won 49.7% of the vote to Ossoff’s 47.9%. Calculated another way, out of almost 5 million votes cast, Perdue missed avoiding a runoff by a little over 13,000 votes.

The Loeffler-Warnock race had another hurdle. Because it was a special election, there weren’t primaries and everyone ran on the same ballot together at once.

In a field of 20 candidates, including a prominent Republican challenger, Loeffler got just over a quarter of the vote.

Warnock actually finished ahead of her, with about a third of the vote. But when the votes were combined by party in that race, Republicans were narrowly ahead of Democrats, 49.4% to 48.4%.

Interest is high, given not just the money spent, but the high early-vote turnout, which began Dec. 14 and continued through Friday.

Column: What Happens If Republicans Win The Senate

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For most of the year, it seemed almost certain that Republicans would win the six additional U.S. Senate seats they need to oust the Democrats from their majority and take control of Congress.

It even seems possible that Senate elections could end in a draw, with a 50-50 split, in which case Vice President Joe Biden would cast votes as a tiebreaker.

And thats not even the most exotic possibility.

But the most intriguing scenario for next years Senate, paradoxically, is the least exotic one: What happens if Republicans win a slim majority of 51 or 52 seats?

More Tax Cuts For The Wealthy And Further Spending Cuts For Middle

Here Is What’s In The Covid

What does the early voting tell us?

It’s always a little tricky to interpret early-voting data and ascribe real meaning to it, but Democrats see some hopeful signs.

Of course, Democrats saw hope in early-voting numbers in Texas before Nov. 3, and Trump wound up winning that state by 6 points, a wider margin than the polls had predicted.

How much money has been spent on the races?

With outside groups included, Republicans have outspent Democrats $271 million to $218 million.

What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse To Certify Democratic Wins

Its something we need to start preparing for now.

And no, thats not an exaggeration. Everything were seeing from the Republican Party is pointing directly to it in 2024.

Support Nonprofit Journalism

A Vote To Repeal The Affordable Care Act

What To Watch For

How Challenges To States Electors Will Work

Lawmakers dont have to give a detailed explanation of why they object; they just object in writing, which Pence will read out loud.

What If The 2020 Election Audits Show Trump Really Won

I. This we do know…

* With a strict constructionist view of the wording in the Constitution, the words are not there to “road map” how to fix possible presidential election fraud.

* The Constitution mentions nothing about the Electoral College re-convening. Historically, the Electoral College has never re-convened for a second time for a presidential certification.

* We know that President Trump is planning something very big and important this summer, and America might look and feel very different by Labor Day Weekend.

Texas Republican Suggests Civil War Will Happen If Democrats Win Georgia Senate Runoffs

During an appearance on Fox News, Rep. Chip Roy told host Tucker Carlson:

But that wasnt all Roy had to say. He added:

i uh..i think a republican member of congress just threatened civil war if the dems win in georgia tomorrow pic.twitter.com/yZhwB75Up1

Andrew Lawrence January 5, 2021

Weakening Of The Investigations Against Trump

More importantly, after the 2018 elections, the electoral process will recede as a constraint on the president and GOP in terms of the Russia investigation at least for a while.

What Congress Is Doing On Wednesday

Wednesday is the penultimate step in the post-election process. All thats left after that is to inaugurate Biden.

I Do Not Buy That A Social Media Ban Hurts Trumps 2024 Aspirations: Nate Silver

What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?

With that being said, the GOPs strategies could still gin up turnout among its base, in particular, but its hard to separate that from general dissatisfaction with Biden.

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