How important is Bennett’s win in Georgia?

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 69 Comments

A strange thing happened in Georgia last week. In the kind of low-turnout election that Democrats are generally expected to lose, a Democratic candidate won a runoff election for a seat in the General Assembly in a traditionally Republican District. Democrat, Taylor Bennett, is a former Georgia Tech quarterback who ran on his opposition to Georgia’s proposed new anti-gay rights law. His opponent comes from a prominent local political family with deep Republican roots.

This outcome cuts against normal expectations in a lot of ways, but how meaningful is it? Here are a few details of Georgia’s State House District 80.

The district is anchored by the newly incorporated town of Brookhaven. It’s an affluent, close-in suburb of Atlanta, better regarded as inter-urban rather than classically suburban. The core of the district is roughly ten minutes from Emory University and twenty minutes from downtown Atlanta. Brookhaven is white, but not overwhelmingly so. The district, which includes a stretch of neighboring Sandy Springs, is a little less thirty percent Hispanic or black. Importantly, Asians now make up 7% of the district’s voters and rising.

Brookhaven was organized about a century ago as a wealthy retreat with a fine country club. It gradually became urbanized, though until a few years ago it resisted incorporation. Now it has ready access to Atlanta’s new rail system with a prominent new station.

From a quick look back at historical election results, Brookhaven is an old-school Republican enclave, a rare haven for Republicans during the years of smothering Democratic dominance in the South. In other words, unlike the rest of the South, it has a local Republican tradition older than the Dixiecrats.

Parts of it have often been represented by Democrats during the Dixiecrat era. This State House seat was previously represented by a Dixiecrat who had changed parties. But it also has a rare tradition of electing Republicans, including the father of Mr. Bennett’s opponent in this election.

An examination of the election results at the precinct level shows the same kind of eroding support for Republicans at the top of the ticket that we see in urban and suburban areas all over the country. Republican vote share in the most heavily Republican precincts in District 80 dropped by roughly 10% just between the ’12 and ’14 elections, down from a historic peak a decade ago.

With his deep local ties and relatively moderate politics, Bennett’s opponent, J Max Davis outperformed both Romney and Perdue in the district’s Republican anchor precincts and he still lost. The growing hostility to the Republican brand outside the party’s core demographic was just too much to overcome.

A few months ago I described Georgia as a state in the GOP’s critical deep-red category that might become competitive soon at the national level. Here’s the factor I identified as critical to the state’s partisan political future:

Georgia’s future political direction will most likely be determined by the outcome of races in Atlanta and its near suburbs that are too local and obscure to draw the attention of outsiders. To an ever increasing extent, Georgia = Atlanta. Metro Atlanta already accounts for half of the state’s electorate. That figure is guaranteed to climb for the foreseeable future.
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Georgia’s future hinges on a factor separate from race and ethnicity – urbanization. Of the four questions that hang over Georgia’s political future, Republican’s ability to hold Atlanta’s suburbs is the most decisive.

How significant is the outcome in this year’s race for Georgia’s 80th House District? It depends on whether that assessment of Georgia’s future is accurate. If inner-suburban or inter-urban areas like Brookhaven hold the key to the GOP’s future, then this outcome is about as dire a warning as you can get.

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Link Roundup, 8/18/15

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 51 Comments
  • Efforts at satire from the right usually suck, see Miller, Dennis. For the most part, conservatism just isn’t funny. An exception has finally emerged. Let me present to you the Edgy White Liberal, available on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s a sample:

edgy

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Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and the Triumph of Entertainment

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 225 Comments

PoliticsOfCrazy_YLW2Listen carefully as enthusiasts describe the appeal of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump and a disturbing pattern emerges. You won’t hear much about policy proposals. You won’t hear much about competence or qualifications for the job. Nobody in either camp seems to care a great deal about what their candidate might do if the dog actually catches the car.

What you will hear are complaints. Other candidates “aren’t listening.” “The system” is dominated by money. My candidate is the only one with the courage to tell the truth. A few complaints might relate to policy in some distant way. Supporters may mention inequality or immigration or some other headline concern. However, deconstruct comments from the two candidates’ supporters and they all revolve around the same core of abstract grievances.

All the energy in our early 2016 campaign season is being generated by candidates at either end of the spectrum who are promising the same singular achievement – breaking our political system. Sanders and Trump use different rhetoric and branding to describe exactly the same product. Neither candidate is a credible national leadership figure. Neither candidate’s enthusiasts articulate any credible political program. Both candidates are offering voters a chance to address a single, pressing grievance – our political system is failing to respond to my needs. Forget the policy platforms, or lack of one, both candidates are offering a political program that replaces the citizen with the consumer.

Those on both sides who emphasize the differences between the two candidates are talking past each other. Yes, Sanders has held elective office. He has been a gadfly, Socialist Senator from Baja Canada. He is not a member of the party whose nomination he seeks. He has never played a meaningful role in any major legislation. As a career politician in a tiny state, he won all of his offices with fewer votes than it takes to become mayor of a large city.

Meanwhile Trump is a reality TV star and political tourist who seems to hold no political views beyond noisy racism and a firm belief in his own fantasticness. By contrast, Sanders is a nice, humble, earnest guy – just like Ron Paul, who has issued detailed position-statements on a wide variety of issues. Their differences are as relevant to the office they seek as their respective hairstyles.

Sanders does not attract crowds because of his leadership credentials or policies. Few who have actually looked at them (anyone?) seriously expects that he could implement those policies. No one seriously believes that he is more capable of serving as the lead administrator of a $4tr government than his Democratic rival. Just like Trump, Sanders’ appeal is fundamentally negative. Both candidates are running against politics rather than for any elected position. They are expressions of frustration, not aspiration.

Both of these candidates embody the tension between our duties as citizens and our desires as consumers. They represent our frustration with a political culture premised on collective duties next to an economic culture premised on atomized, instantaneous, individual satisfaction.

Commentators all over the spectrum are consistently describing this phenomenon as a failure of our political system. “The system” no longer “hears” ordinary people. This critique usually centers around the influence of money in our politics, but this is a strange scapegoat.

Money matters, but it has never in our history mattered less than it does now. In our grandparents’ childhood you could still literally buy a Senate seat in a scene on state house floors that very nearly resembled an auction. Before Nixon there were no enforceable campaign finance laws at the Federal level.

This is not about money. It is not about a failure of “politicians” or “government.” We own this government collectively in a truer sense than any human beings have ever owned their government. We own its failures absolutely. Sanders and Trump are emblematic of our own collective failure to adapt to a changing world.

Blaming the system is a lazy escape. We are increasingly unwilling to invest the time and energy required to operate and adapt our political system. There has never been a point in our history when our government has been more keenly and assiduously responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens. When people talk about the failure of government to represent their needs they aren’t comparing the present to the past, they are comparing citizenship to consumption. Consumers make lousy citizens.

A political system that capably and responsibly addresses the public needs of 350 million highly diverse people is not going to “listen to me.” Politics is not Burger King. You cannot have it your way. There is one gateway to healthy expression in an electoral democracy – participate personally in small-scale grassroots organizations with a presence in your local community. Research indicates that about 1% of American voters consistently do this. Few people do it because it has become the most costly thing in the world to do. In an economic environment this free, nothing is more expensive than my time and attention.

Two hundred years of progressively more democratic representative government taught us to be citizens. Global capitalism has, over the course of a few decades, taught us to be consumers.

Capitalism assigned value based on the results of individual transactions, at a moment in time, in which neither of the parties has any duties to each other beyond the exchange. Capitalism places enormous social and economic power in the hands of consumers.

Citizenship is dull and demanding, fraught with compromise. As citizens, our individual desires are constantly tempered by the needs of our neighbors, the consequences of our choices, and constraints imposed by basic human compassion.

Consumption is exciting and fast. As a consumer there are no interests in play beyond my own. I have no obligations to my vendors beyond a contract premised on money. As a consumer, whatever fails to accommodate my personal needs and feelings in any particular moment can be discarded without a thought.

Citizenship is premised on a network of shared duties extending over time, even beyond my own lifespan. Consumption is premised on my personal needs as they may be expressed in a momentary transaction.

Politics is just the tip of this melting iceberg. What sits beneath the decay of our political institutions is a wider social phenomenon born of global capitalism and consumer ideology. As Robert Putnam has so capably documented in his work, beginning with Bowling Alone, our personal engagement in social institutions, often referred to as social capital, has entered a phase of steep decline.

From Boy Scouts, to youth sports, to PTAs and churches, almost any institution that demands an investment of time, energy and compromise collectively with those around us is experiencing a steep decline in engagement. Churches that required a personal investment of effort and attention are being swept aside by churches that treat attendees like customers. Fewer people than ever have time for PTAs or school board meetings, but yoga studios are booming.

Global capitalism has been a massive force for human wellbeing, more potent and beneficial than Gandhi, Jesus, Mother Teresa and Oprah all rolled together. No transformation that powerful can occur without placing enormous evolutionary demands on our social structures. We are not adapting. At this stage, as liberal democracy and market economics just completed their triumph, they are already being battered to shreds by forces we barely attempt to understand.

The book, The Politics of Crazy: How America Lost Its Mind and What We Can Do About It, describes this phenomenon and offers a set of recommendations for how we can adapt. It would be a mistake to try to shut down the growth of global capitalism. Its negatives are vastly outweighed by its benefits. Successful adaptation requires recognizing new demands and building institutions that can flourish under these changing conditions. We can do this, but throwing support behind grievance candidates incapable of governing is not going to get us there.

In the meantime, the energy we spend on entertainers like Sanders and Trump is an investment in self-destruction. They are selling the same product using different theme music. One may be bombastic while the other is grandfatherly, but neither makes a credible claim to competence as a national executive leader. Representative politics can survive under global capitalism, but only if we have the intelligence and maturity know the difference between citizenship and consumption. If we insist that politics be entertainment, we will forever be led by clowns.

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Posted in Election 2016, Politics of Crazy

Is Politics Becoming Irrelevant?

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 91 Comments
President Camacho addresses a joint session of Congress - from the movie Idiocracy

President Camacho addresses a joint session of Congress – from the movie Idiocracy

Trump’s poll numbers have actually swelled since the debate. Executive management at Fox News reached out to Trump to officially kiss his gold-plated kiester and ask him to keep it up. The TMZ of broadcast journalism is now drowning the Republican nominating race by cultivating a political version of the Swift/Minaj feud. It’s great for ratings. I can’t wait to see the product placements at the next debate.

One might express concern at a clownish entertainment figure ruining a serious political institution, but that complaint doesn’t carry very far. With or without Trump this was never going to be more than a circus. Almost all of the candidates are there to promote their book, solicit speaking engagements, audition for a TV show, or to sell Uncle Huckabee’s Down-Home, Biblical Cures For What Ails ‘Ya.

In the first poll after the debate, 51% of Republican respondents were supporting Trump, Carson, Cruz or Huckabee. Let that sink in for a minute. If that is even remotely accurate then Republicans aren’t merely losing the White House, they have lost their everloving minds, never to find them again, not even with help from their grandkids. There is no way for a remotely credible Republican candidate to drive around that 51% boulder in the road. Trump isn’t the problem.

Have we, as a culture, simply lost our interest in civic engagement? Are we too self-absorbed, insulated and isolated from one another to muster the minimal energy required to give a shit?

More and more I find myself thinking of Mike Judge’s box office bomb, Idiocracy. At the time I thought it was crude and over the top. It is starting to look like a documentary.

By the way, for all the smug Democrats out there convinced that this is merely a Republican problem, hopefully you’ve been following the outbreak of leftwing hand-wringing over Bernie Sanders’ supposed lack of racial sensitivity. The courageous act of defiance by a ‘Black Lives Matter’ activist in shutting down Sanders’ Seattle appearance is just a foretaste of what’s coming on your side of the aisle. To top it off, one of the organizers of the incident is a Tea Party supporter and Sarah Palin fan. Keep in mind too that Alan Grayson is running for Senate in Florida and he might actually win. Have fun, guys.

Can we survive and thrive after electoral politics has become irrelevant? What will America look like under the leadership of a Congress full of right and left-wing Ted Cruz’s and a President worse than George W. Bush? Can we function effectively if our public sphere is maintained only by a professional bureaucracy and our corporate leadership? Is there a backlash from sane citizens in the works somewhere? If so, how can I join?

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That time I helped Trump win the nomination

Posted on August 8, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 72 Comments

This is an awkward story. The longer the Trump campaign rolls on the more it bothers me. Time to get this off my chest.

Our tale begins long ago in a simpler age. Phones had wires, MTV played music videos, and quality airlines offered seating in a non-smoking section.

In Southeast Texas, government teachers from several area schools hit on a brilliant idea. Bring students together for the day in a mock political convention. Civics and patriotism would come to life as young people simulated the process of selecting a party’s Presidential nominee.

Seven or eight local schools participated, each sending a delegation of students from that semester’s government classes. Each school would act as a state delegation. There would be speeches, committees and so on. At the end of the day the delegates would select a nominee.

Organizers invited local print and TV journalists who would get a chance to fill space with an easy feel-good story. Principals and school board members made appearances. What a great opportunity to show off the best and brightest building character and preparing to take their place in our democracy.

It isn’t a party until somebody starts breaking stuff.

Problems loomed right from the beginning and they were evident just by looking around the room. Two of the schools, mine included, were almost entirely black. The rest were entirely white. Partly by chance, and partly because they were unusually large schools, those two black schools had brought a large number of students. However, since the simulation was built around the Republican nominating race, these students were generally disinterested, a little annoyed, and entirely unfamiliar with the candidates.

As the process got rolling, earnest political nerds from some of the suburban schools dove in head first, making their case for Bush or Kemp or even Robertson with a bit more passion than the situation called for. For all their fervor, they assiduously avoided the section of the convention floor where my school and another black school had been seated. Apart from a few sparks of interest, that corner of the convention was disengaged, bored and awkwardly ignored, waiting for it all to end so that they could collect their additional class credit and go home.

We were, however, a massive voting bloc. The two schools, if they could collaborate, would account for about 38% of the delegates. Yes, I was counting. The other six schools were divided among the four candidates. In our delegation about four of us were deeply interested in the process. It didn’t take us very long to recognize that we were sitting on a deciding vote.

We began shopping the room for alliances, but we had a problem. It was proving very difficult to unite our delegation around any of the four available candidates. Worse, creating any link with delegations from the other schools was difficult because of…cultural differences. There was tension. Our bloc held a dominating share of the votes, but we were being treated like a junior partner from the administration on down. It was difficult to get someone from the other schools to even come over to speak without discomfort.

We decided to break the deadlock by breaking the process. Screw it. We were going to make up our own candidate, forge our own alliances, and take over the convention.

This was an idea that the delegations from the two black schools could get behind. Being a giant business dork, my first candidate had been Lee Iacocca. No one knew who that was, so I pivoted to…you guessed it.

That worked.

Since Trump was not a candidate and as such had no stated policy positions, we just made some up. But policy didn’t matter much. What won the day was an impressive show on the floor and a willingness to turn the whole exercise on its head.

The organizers had given us campaign signs to simulate the scene on a convention floor, but obviously there weren’t any for Trump. In a scramble for material we discovered that someone had half a pack of Now & Laters (for those who don’t know, it was a roll of candy from olden’ times). It became a vital prop as several of us delivered campaign speeches across the convention floor.

In a perfectly timed gesture, someone would throw me the candy roll. I would finish my speech with the tagline that Trump was the candidate for “Now (catch the roll in midair, logo facing forward) and Later.“ It was a nice trick that actually earned applause.

Earnest participants from the other schools were outraged as we began to build committed support from among their delegations for a candidate that wasn’t even running. A couple of them even made tentative, uncomfortable visits to our little neighborhood in a too-little, too-late gesture. A few of their faculty representatives barred us from coming over. A certain subtext of racial tension began to bubble as our large, otherwise disengaged, black coalition began to see an opportunity to exercise some power.

Before the teachers and administrators could organize a response we managed to force a floor vote. When Trump won there was a cheer. An actual cheer. But the process wasn’t over. More civics lessons were coming.

With reporters and administrators nervously hovering, the organizers scrambled. They were planning to have their faces on the evening news, but not like this. “Area educators lead students in patriotic exercise” had just devolved into “Disgruntled teenagers hijack civic exercise, foreshadowing dark times to come.”

One of the teachers took to the stage to announce, in a patronizing “we’ve received a message from Santa” style, that Donald Trump had called in to decline the nomination. The crowd was not pleased. We had already run over our time. Now we couldn’t go home until we’d finished this stupid exercise. No one goes home until souls have been crushed into a malleable paste.

Our group at first refused to submit a vote, but then we were informed that our class credit was at stake. We agreed to get it over with and nominate whoever the kids from the suburban districts wanted. I don’t even remember who won. I do remember who lost. I don’t think they ever attempted that simulation again.

Needless to say, that memory is a little awkward for me now. My first taste of the political process involved a semi-successful campaign to nominate Donald Trump.

Lessons learned?

****

By the way, this is probably the best movie about politics that’s ever been made: Election

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Enter the Trump Collapse Pool

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 33 Comments

If you haven’t entered our pool to guess the date when the Trump campaign collapses, this might be a good time. See the current entries and share your guess here:

https://goplifer.com/2015/07/22/guess-when-trumps-campaign-collapses/

Posted in Uncategorized

The European Model

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 69 Comments

Life in the social democracies of Western Europe is nice…really nice. Beautifully neat, well-organized cities are connected via plentiful and inexpensive mass transit. Work-life balance is an obsessive cultural priority. European countries feature six weeks of paid vacation, maternity leave, ready access to high quality, tax-subsidized healthcare, very little crime and virtually no violence by US standards. They enjoy far higher levels of social mobility than the US alongside economic growth rates that rival any of the developed nations.

Those who have experienced it might describe the European Dream as the envy of the world. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination is drawing America’s attention to this social/political alternative. So, why shouldn’t the US import more of this approach to economics and politics?

There’s a simple answer. Europe’s economic model has a critical dependency that is often overlooked. La Dolce Vita has its price. The model depends heavily on America’s willingness to bear the burden of relentless creative destruction and a global security obligation. If the US adopted this model it would begin to suffocate under its own weight. Beyond this weakness lies a deeper question of values, a philosophical conflict which, though intangible, should not be ignored.

How does the European model work? For starters, don’t call it socialism. Western Europe began to dismantle state ownership of capital, forced unionization, and the other elements of socialist economics half a century ago and little remains of that model. For many Americans who have grown accustomed to the idea that any state spending is Communism, that concept may be a little challenging. Here’s a primer.

European social democracy today rests on a sort of loose state-capitalism subsidized by American military patronage. At the nation-state level, the system operates as a three-way deal. Capital is almost entirely in private hands, but workers enjoy high levels of job security and other protections. The state regulates private industry very heavily. On top of a dense network of market regulations the state also imposes deeply intrusive management rules, like mandating employee representation on boards of directors. In exchange, those enterprises enjoy tremendous levels of state sponsorship, subsidies and protection. The same rules that burden each firm also raises barriers to the entry of fresh new competition. European economics is a tight partnership between state, capital, and labor.

Critical to that deal is the American military juggernaut. If you paid taxes in the US last year, one fifth of that total went to your military. Consider veterans’ health care and that percentage rises to nearly a quarter. That’s more than the US spends on Medicare.

If you paid taxes in Germany last year, military spending accounted for less than 1/20th of your burden. Even if you contend that much of US military spending is unnecessary, Europe still enjoys a massive public windfall from its ability to disregard any concern for national defense and security.

That windfall is larger than it appears on paper, for if European countries were responsible for their own defense it is unlikely that the EU would even exist as a political and economic entity. International and sectarian tensions currently subsumed beneath the blanked of US military dominance would undermine regional economic collaboration. The EU is a happy consequence of the US military-industrial complex.

The model works for now, within certain bounds. For all the noise about Greece, European economies are relatively stable, chugging along at a fairly predictable rate compared to the volatile swings in America. The model produces higher unemployment levels and slightly slower growth than the US, but compensates with a more generous social safety net. Tax rates are relatively high, but not nearly as high as Americans tend to imagine, comparable to levels experienced in New York or California. Meanwhile government services are remarkably efficient, politics is relatively transparent and representative, tax codes are simple, civil liberties are broad, and citizens enjoy access to plentiful public capital.

For all its benefits, European social democracy experiences a built-in vulnerability. In a time of spectacular economic and political dynamism, it is intensely conservative. Here again, Europeans benefit from the relatively chaotic nature of the US economic model.

Containing the collateral impact of disruption through tightly managed social and political order has been a vital key to maintaining Europe’s quality of life. In effect, European democracies have outsourced dynamic capitalism to the US. They enjoy the benefits of a messy, turbulent, disruptive economic order in the form of a steady flow of technological innovation while insulating their state-corporate entities from the disruptive impact of that innovation.

You can see the effects of this model most starkly in the software industry. By conventional logic Europe should be a hotbed for software development. With a highly educated population and large sophisticated economies, you might expect a vibrant technology industry. It exists, but it looks very different than the US.

Europe’s only software giant, SAP, was built on software discarded by IBM in a merger forty years ago. Most of Europe’s other major software players emerged from large state industries or coops, like Dassault and DATEV. They are just as slow, old, bloated, and deeply tied to the old state-capital partnership model as any of the region’s steel companies. Europe embraces technology exports from the more vibrant US, but only very carefully and usually through state-supported channels like public telephone and health care companies.

There is a bubbling start-up culture in Europe, but it has yet to produce a massive, mature company. Europe’s most exciting tech ventures, like Spotify and Skype, achieve lasting success though American buy-outs. Software and other tech industries have not been allowed to exert the same cultural influence in Europe that they have achieved in America.

It is often mentioned that Europe is culturally less friendly to economic risk takers than the US, but seldom does anyone explain why. The era of information capitalism that is transforming American life is dangerous to European social democracy. Entrepreneurship is an inherently disruptive activity. Successful entrepreneurs change the landscape around them in ways that ripple out far beyond the presence of a new product or a new shop.

Allowing established firms with thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees to be rendered obsolete by a few punks in their garage could wreak havoc. There is no market for disruption in Europe. It is an anti-value. Innovation, like any other disruption, is tightly managed. European social democracy is an inherently conservative social order.

When Uber, for example, arrived in American cities there was resistance from politically entrenched business models, but that resistance is rapidly breaking down. Many current business models for taxis are disappearing into bankruptcy as they should. For the most part, the American public is pleased.

When Uber arrived in Paris there were riots and its executives were arrested. That’s European social democracy in a nutshell.

If the US adopted the European model of social democracy the entire enterprise would lose its oxygen supply. American dynamism is the unacknowledged keystone of the European social order.

Even if these weaknesses could somehow be resolved, there remains one more issue that renders the European model less appealing to Americans. Living in Europe surrounded by the ancient beauty of its castles, monuments, museums, and cathedrals, one nagging discomfort lingers. It feels as though everything important that was ever going to happen there is already in the past. Europe is boring, a living vacation-land where nothing of real consequence or meaningful human significance is going to happen. Europe is where the Western World went to retire.

We should not be too quick to abandon the vibrant chaos that defines American life. With that chaos comes opportunity. There is a vital spiritual value in the continuing uncertainty that Americans embrace and even cultivate. It feeds life, liveliness and vitality.

One can have too much security, too much comfort. There is something electric about living in the place where practically everything that really matters in human affairs is happening. We have much to learn from our cousins across the pond, but we must not admire their model to death.

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Posted in Economics

A look at the 2016 Senate Races

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 96 Comments

With any hope of retaking the White House slipping behind the big Blue Ball, Republicans badly need to retain the Senate. Regardless of what happens to the House, another four-to-eight years of Democratic control of the Presidency promises a massive remake of the court system. Holding the Senate will be a critical brake on that revolution.

A big win in 2014 provided a valuable cushion. That buffer should help Republicans avoid a Democratic super-majority after the 2016 election, but it wasn’t big enough to sustain any hope of Senate control. The math is relentless. Republicans will lose the Senate in 2016 and face long odds against regaining it in 2018.

This is the shape of the game:

Currently we get a very different electorate in a Presidential election year from the one we see in off-years. That gap is slowly closing, but for now it remains pretty pronounced. Turnout for the 2016 national election will be 70-90% higher than it was in 2014. That voting pool will be the least white and most Hispanic in our history, trends which are accelerating.

Compared to the 2014 voting pool voters in 2016, and to a lesser extent 2018, will on average be younger, less religious, more urban, and less white than in 2012 and 2014. The amplitude of the Democratic wave will vary based on location, but it will be higher than the difference between 2010 and 2012. These demographic trends are slowly cutting into the Republican off-year advantage, forcing the party to start playing defense on a broader and broader front.

Republicans currently hold the advantage in the Senate by a margin of 54-46. In 2016, Republicans will be defending 24 of the 34 seats up for election. Out of those 24, ten are in a state that 1) Obama carried at least once, and 2) already has one Democratic Senator. In other words, these are places where Democrats can and consistently do win in a Presidential election year.

Democrats will be defending two seats that Republicans could conceivably win, Colorado and Nevada. Unfortunately under 2016 conditions those states will be almost as difficult for Republicans as New Hampshire or Pennsylvania. Given the shape of the electorate in a Presidential election year, it will be almost impossible for Republicans to flip any Democratic seats in 2016.

Keep in mind that detailed analysis isn’t easy this far out. Senate races are more fluid than the Presidency. Personalities and local forces have a greater impact on the outcome. Let’s break the Republicans’ 24 seats in the 2016 election into four buckets: the Kiss List, certain holds, likely losses, and likely competitive wins.

1) The ‘Kiss List,’ as in, ‘kiss ‘em goodbye’ (4)

IL – Mark Kirk
NH – Kelly Ayotte
PA – Toomey
WI – Johnson

It hardly matters who runs in these races. These seats were won solely on the power of the 2010 Obamacare paranoia. It would take a Democratic collapse on an epochal scale for Republicans to retain any of those seats.

Drop four seats without gaining one elsewhere and the Republicans have lost the Senate.

2) Certain GOP holds (5)

AL – Shelby
ID – Crapo
OK – Lankford
SC – Scott
UT – Lee

There are some places that just aren’t going to be competitive no matter how weird things get. Demographics mean that South Carolina might become competitive soon, but Democrats show no signs of assembling any credible organization. Scott is vulnerable there, but it doesn’t look like anyone is going to challenge him in a serious way. Lee might lose a primary, but whoever beats him has a ticket to DC.

3) Interesting races, in order of vulnerability (6)

OH – Portman
FL – (retiring)
NC – Burr
IN – (retiring)
MO – Blount
AZ – McCain

Based on demographics, candidates, and current polling, Democrats can be reasonably confident of winning the first three. The second three are vulnerable based on contingencies.

In all of the bottom three races, Republicans are likely to do something stupid, making it possible for Dems to pick one up. McCain is a wildcard. If McCain loses his primary, that seat will flip. Flake won Arizona in 2012 by only a few thousand votes. You can expect that Hispanics are going to be motivated, organized and deeply hostile to Arizona Republicans in 2016.

4) Competitive, but likely GOP wins (9)

IA – Iowans like Grassley, but the state has gone blue in the last three Presidential years.
ND – Depends on who runs. North Dakotans elected a Democrat in the last Presidential year.
AK – Murkowski is very popular, but it depends on who runs. AK had a Democratic Senator and Independent Governor until last year.
AR – Boozman is a cardboard cutout who will attract a strong challenger. The race is a good test of whether Democrats can still be competitive in the South under even the most favorable conditions.
GA – Democrats proved in ’14 that the state can be competitive. Demographics are trending hard in their favor.
KS – Discord inside the GOP is high and climbing. In a Presidential year there could be a surprise.
KY – Rand Paul is an awkward fit there.
LA – Vitter has a lot of ugly baggage. Again, demographics have potential to make this interesting.
SD – Just like ND, SD does elect Democrats to the Senate in Presidential years. Depend on candidates.

Conclusions

Looking across the entire field, it’s clear that Republicans can’t realistically hold the Senate in 2016. Barring some historic Republican collapse, losing in places in Georgia, Louisiana and Kentucky, it will be also be impossible for Democrats to gain a super-majority. Democrats should pick up somewhere between seven and twelve seats.

A good Republican rebound in the 2018 races could help Republicans gain back as many as seven seats, but probably no more than that. If Democrats pick up eleven seats in 2016, which is a possibility but a stretch, they will likely hold the Senate for a very long time.

There is one other likely outcome from the 2016 races that should worry everyone on both sides. Unless the Democrats have a very big year, only three or four states will continue to have Senate delegations split between parties. If the map holds as expected, we will see a geographic consolidation of our political parties more extreme than at any time since the Civil War. All policy questions aside, this is an unhealthy trend with uncertain implications.

From Wikipedia:

2016 Senate Races
2018 Senate Races

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Posted in blue wall, Election 2016, Republican Party

The Planned Parenthood Video Scam Will Backfire – Again

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 46 Comments

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

A short time ago a shell organization associated with Operation Rescue hatched a brilliant plan. These geniuses would use hidden camera footage to prove that Planned Parenthood was in the business of selling fetal tissue for profit.

Their plan failed because it was delusional from start to finish. No worries, in the world of right-wing media, failure is the foundation on which “Mission Accomplished” is built. They declared victory, released their videos, and assumed no one would notice that the videos didn’t support their case.

It is nearly impossible for reasonable people to engage in a debate over abortion. Under the best of circumstances abortion is a challenging subject because it represents two fully legitimate civil rights in conflict with one another.

Worse, the pivot point for that conflict – the moment when “life” begins – is an inherently philosophical matter, beyond any empirical resolution. On the question of abortion we are forced to wrestle with competing rights of the utmost sanctity which can only be mediated through an entirely subjective process. Every realistic policy option in this debate entails a compromise of rights deeply felt by someone with good justification.

Into this realm of ambiguity floats an army of malignant fundamentalists, unburdened by the uncertainties that accompany humility. Determined to demolish any space that may have existed for reasoned debate, they are intent on imposing their will through fraud, distortion, or even violence. Yet again, by ignoring a complex reality in pursuit of a comfortingly simple narrative, the right wing deception machine has stirred up all the usual sound and fury among all the usual people. Their efforts will further isolate the Republican Party from the national mainstream while placing any reasonable policy debate on abortion even farther out of reach.

Informed by their delusions about abortions and the people who conduct them, those who filmed these dull lunch sequences were braced for breathtaking revelations. They did their best, with selective editing, to create something remotely interesting. In the end, the videos contain the following insights which you are meant to find shocking:

1) Women sometimes have abortions.

2) Those women have the option to donate fetal tissue for medical research.

3) Donor organizations have the legal right to accept payment from researchers to cover their costs.

4) Some people who work for Planned Parenthood are willing to have detailed conversations about abortion over lunch.

That’s it. Watch the videos over and over again. Play them backwards. There’s nothing else in them.

The activities the Planned Parenthood representatives discussed are not merely legal in the sense that “there’s no law against that.” Their activities have been formally standardized and regulated by a specific federal law passed in 1993, supported by major figures on the Republican right. Nothing anywhere in the videos runs afoul of that law or any other. The only crimes featured in those videos were committed by the people who illegally filmed them.

Why did prominent, hyper-conservative Republicans support the legal framework Planned Parenthood is using for these donations? Because it’s an outstanding idea.

Tactics of abortion extremists highlight a particular problem for Republicans. By further encasing the GOP base inside a delusional bubble removed from any of the complexity, nuance, or ambiguity that bedevils life in the real world, these tactics make constructive, intelligent debate on complex issues simply impossible. They chain Republicans to unpopular positions from which we are unable to achieve either a victory or a compromise.

In the absence of any framework on which to build constructive engagement on abortion rights, we get stalemate. That stalemate could be broken with efforts toward some sensible policy solution, but that’s not the goal of the GOP’s abortion fetishists. Their genius plan is to break the stalemate with increased polarization. Needless to say, it isn’t working and it isn’t going to.

After forty years of increasingly desperate and even violent anti-abortion activism, public opinion on abortion remains right where it was when the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Roe v. Wade. More than 80% of the American public opposes the absolutist abortion position being forced onto Republican candidates by abortion activists. That’s an enormous majority. You can’t assemble an 80% consensus in favor of chocolate ice cream.

It gets worse. A solid majority of Americans under-55 identify themselves as “pro-choice,” roughly the same percentage that has held that position for decades. That includes a third of Republicans. Picking a fight on ground you are bound to lose is a suboptimal strategy.

These Breitbart tactics are fantastically self-destructive. It’s one thing to be unpopular. It’s another thing altogether to be an unpopular asshole. Now, the same idiots who interrupt town hall meetings to rant about Benghazi or Jade Helm or death panels can spice up their gibberish with half-baked references to fetal body parts. Another win for sound and fury.

There is good reason to be repulsed by abortion, just as there is good reason to be repulsed by cancer surgery. Like abortion, cancer surgery is gruesome and bloody and miserable to look at. No one’s vision for their life includes the hope of experiencing either procedure. Only an idiot would respond to the misery of cancer surgery by banning it because it’s icky. It makes much more sense to make cancer surgery less necessary by fighting cigarette smoking and encouraging people to eat vegetables and so on.

While abortion fetishists wander around under giant banners of mangled fetal tissue, other people are slowly making progress toward ending abortion. We know how to reduce the incidence of abortion – educate young people on how their bodies work and how to make choices about reproduction. Thanks to these efforts, championed let’s remember by Planned Parenthood, rates of teen pregnancy and teen birth, the twin harbingers of lifetime poverty, are approaching historic lows. Abortion rates are tumbling right along with them.

Technology is also pitching in with cheaper, more effective methods of birth control and pharmaceutical options for safely ending a pregnancy when the fetus is little more than a few dozen cells. If we embraced a basket of strategies that gave women more knowledge and power over reproduction, abortion would gradually shrink to the margins of our society. So why does the so-called “pro-life” movement oppose all of these measures?

This is the most important statistic in the abortion debate: Abortion comprises about 3% of Planned Parenthood’s activities.

Almost everything else Planned Parenthood does reduces the need for abortion. Through its heavy emphasis on women’s health, contraception, and education, Planned Parenthood has probably prevented more abortions that any other organization in the United States. That 3% figure is very important for understanding why abortion opponents hate Planned Parenthood so very much.

Planned Parenthood is not a target because of the small fraction of their energy devoted to abortion. For the mullahs guiding the “pro-life” movement, nothing inspires more horror than a woman making her own sexual choices. They will not accept any political measure that would limit the frequency of abortion unless it would also limit the range of life options available to women. Anti-abortion activists would hate Planned Parenthood just as deeply if it stopped performing abortions this afternoon.

Planned Parenthood is not a target because of 3% of their activities. Anti-abortion activists hate Planned Parenthood because of everything it does and stands for.

That’s what makes the anti-abortion lobby a dead weight around Republicans’ necks. That’s why abortion opponents have failed to gain an inch of ground in public opinion in forty years of effort. That’s why this video stunt, along with whatever stupid tactics these people adopt next, will only make it harder to elect Republicans.

Someone will have to bend on the question of abortion rights. Anyone who actually believes that the GOP is going to breach the Blue Wall through abortion extremism should not be trusted with a position of authority. Hell, you probably shouldn’t leave them to watch your kids or take care of your dog.

These videos ‘signify nothing.’ They are merely one more force separating the Republican base from political reality. We have to find an alternative to the politics of ‘sound and fury.’ There simply is no public consensus to support an absolute position on abortion. This issue needs to recede from the center of Republican policy before the party can once again achieve national relevance.

“Let me endure your wrath, if ’t be not so.”

More:

Protecting All Unborn Life in Texas

How Texas Disciplines Unchaste Women

Trapped in an Abortion Stalemate

Breaking the Abortion Stalemate

Texas is not Pro-Life

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Posted in Election 2016, Reproductive Rights

Our Next Republican President

Posted on July 26, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 139 Comments

Finding a gap in the Blue Wall was going to be nearly impossible in 2016 no matter who the party nominated. As the primary process descends into the political equivalent of a toxic waste spill, that goal has receded from view. We have been Trumped. Merely keeping the party intact will be a noteworthy accomplishment.

Even the greatest dynasties in pro sports occasionally go through a ‘rebuilding’ phase. Cycles of retirement, injuries, or poor draft choices can lead to a slump. Sometimes the only way to recover is to trade away a few key players and plan to endure several difficult years on the way back to the top.

Republicans are facing just such a rebuilding phase. With no shot at national relevance in the immediate future it would make sense to invest energy in a long term plan.

It isn’t terribly difficult to conjure up the profile of the next Republican President. Our problem is that the party, as currently composed, is incapable of cultivating and eventually nominating such a figure. In order to set down a marker, let’s describe the likely characteristics of that winning candidate.

Former Governor or business figure or both

Of the sixteen current candidates for the nomination, eleven of them have either been a Governor or have never served in office. That’s not an accident.

Under current conditions, deep ties to the party are a virtual disqualification for national office. Almost anyone who has experienced sustained success in the existing party infrastructure would fail to meet the requirements for national political appeal.

If our next GOP President has served in a public office, he will likely have been a Governor. Of all the major offices, Governor demands the least in terms of party involvement and offers the most individual independence. If she isn’t a former Governor she will probably be a business executive of some kind.

From a Northern state

Republican politics in the solidly red states of the South and Mountain West virtually guarantee a dead weight of nationally unpopular positions. Our next Republican President will have mastered the art of being a Republican in an urban, northern environment.

Nominally pro-life

It is inconceivable that the GOP could produce a truly pro-choice nominee at any point in the near future. Our next successful nominee will more or less successfully label himself “pro-life” while keeping his distance from the real pro-life agenda – just like Ronald Reagan*. No one is going to win a national election while embracing the creepy fetishists who parade under eight-foot posters of aborted fetuses. Maintaining a safe distance from anti-abortion enthusiasts while maintaining a veneer of inoffensive pro-lifeishness will be an essential key to success. It will also be the most challenging element of the nominating process.

Disinterested in social conservatism

Our next Republican President will have no interest in homosexuality, school prayer, or any other component of the campaign to legislate white, Protestant Christianity. She will probably have nice things to say about church and God and family, and angels and so on. Meanwhile, religious priorities will appear nowhere on her policy agenda.

Willing to acknowledge the Four Inescapable Realities

Failure to acknowledge these four truths means being as categorically, empirically wrong as it’s possible to be in the otherwise mushy, gray realm of politics:

1) Climate change is real and it is caused primarily by human activity.

2) Human beings evolved from simpler life forms, and the same evolutionary process shapes all living systems.

3) Abortion is a complex issue because it involves two legitimate liberty interests in conflict with one another.

4) Race still skews economic outcomes in the United States.

The next Republican President will openly embrace all of these four inescapable realities.

More concerned about regulation than taxes

Supply side economics is an abject failure. Many wealthy donors like it because it cuts their taxes. Far right conservatives like it because it weakens government. Anyone who actually cares about so-called ‘fiscal conservatism’ has to acknowledge that it has been a train wreck and move on.

Modest variations in the tax rate have no impact on growth. A tax rate, as long as it is stable, predictable, and below a certain confiscatory maximum, is just another cost of doing business. Jiggling it up or down has no effect on anything other than government revenue.

On the other hand, our regulatory and bureaucratic climate has a significant impact on growth. Our next Republican President will care less about tax rates than about tax transparency and cost-effective regulation.

Not frightened by brown people

Our next Republican President will be capable of being surrounded by a black or Hispanic audience without breaking into flop-sweats. Until we nominate a guy who can win 40% of the Hispanic vote and 15-20% of African-Americans, no Republican will enter the White House grounds except as a guest (or perhaps by gliding onto the lawn in an ultralight).

She will campaign intelligently on the South side of Chicago, in Detroit, and in Trenton. She will speak at every major national assembly of the Urban League, the NAACP, and La Raza without condescension or hostility. By doing so, she will break the Blue Wall and win at least two of these five states: Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan or Pennsylvania.

Republicans already have major figures that possess these qualities. GOP Governors in Massachusetts and Illinois match this wish list virtually line by line. However, we probably won’t be able to get someone with this combination of qualities on a Presidential ballot until the Republican Party is capable of producing a lot more of them. One Bruce Rauner is not enough.

Governor Rauner and Governor Baker are rare outliers who emerged in spite of considerable intra-party resistance. Neither of them would stand a shadow of a chance of winning a GOP Presidential nomination under current conditions.

Once we understand the profile of a winning character the next step is to figure out how the party can cultivate them. That’s going to be the hard part.

*President Reagan understood how to recruit pro-life activists without being owned by them. As Governor of California he signed into law the nation’s most liberal pro-choice legislation. Never once did he make a personal appearance at the annual pro-life rally protesting Roe v. Wade. He addressed the rallies by phone, even when they were happening just down the street from the White House. On social issues, especially abortion, Reagan said all the right things while never allowing those issues to intrude on his legislative agenda.

And as a side-note for those who don’t remember, Saint Ronny also caught holy hell from his fellow Republicans for negotiating a landmark treaty with America’s greatest enemy. Just sayin…

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Posted in blue wall, Climate Change, Religious Right, Republican Party
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