(04-12-2018 06:24 AM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  No melt down here. Our revenge will come in November. I'll play mostly fair until then - mostly.....

Yea, November is coming. But there's always the Rasmussen Poll to keep them warm at night.

And in just 14 short months, the Iowa and South Carolina straw polls for Trumps replacement will be starting up.

(04-12-2018 09:50 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 06:24 AM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  No melt down here. Our revenge will come in November. I'll play mostly fair until then - mostly.....

Yea, November is coming. But there's always the Rasmussen Poll to keep them warm at night.

And in just 14 short months, the Iowa and South Carolina straw polls for Trumps replacement will be starting up.

lol, from what I hear, the MSM is pushing this "Blue Wave" narrative. Let's see if folks start running with it. If so, the MSM has done it's job. Again.

(04-12-2018 09:56 AM)VA49er Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 09:50 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 06:24 AM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  No melt down here. Our revenge will come in November. I'll play mostly fair until then - mostly.....

Yea, November is coming. But there's always the Rasmussen Poll to keep them warm at night.

And in just 14 short months, the Iowa and South Carolina straw polls for Trumps replacement will be starting up.

lol, from what I hear, the MSM is pushing this "Blue Wave" narrative. Let's see if folks start running with it. If so, the MSM has done it's job. Again.

Well its been largely backed up by actual elections and turnout numbers since Trump won the Electoral College. I'm not sure its just a narrative. It is the MSM's job to report the news. And that news has been that the alt-right/Trump has been largely getting their butts kicked in a lot of elections since 2016. Look if you don't want to see actual news based on recent facts, and transparent polls, there's always Fox News/Info Wars and Rasmussen.

It doesnt take a genius to opine on the most likely result when you have a deeply unpopular, unstable, and profoundly ethically challenged President, who only got 43% of the vote (and has done everything possible to antagonize everyone who didn't vote for him), and a group of Congressmen and Senators who are largely gerrymandered into power only catering to the 25-30% of the electorate that constitutes a majority in the President's party's primaries.

There were two special elections last week. In Iowa, the Dems increased their performance by 14 points over Clinton. This is a 95.8 percent white district. Sure, the GOP held the seat, but again, add double digits to Democratic performance and you could get a significant blue wave. The other election was in Florida, where the Dems held the district, but still increased their performance by 25 percent over Clinton.

While I was out of town, Alabama (HD-21) also had a special election. This resulted in a GOP hold. By 300 votes. Its also a largely anglo district. Trump won this district by 30 points. And there was a special elections in Massachusetts, where a Democrat upset a heavily favored Republican for a Bristol based state legislative seat. Mass is liberal, Bristol isn't.

There are no special elections next week but in 2 weeks, there's a massive slew of them.

Basically, a pattern is developing. Dems are outperforming the GOP in special elections across the board. And not usually by the 5 to 7 points one might expect for an out of party in a special election, but by an average of 15-20 points. If the Dems increase their vote totals by half that, they take the House. If they increase their vote percentage by 10 points, they could win 50 seats. If Trump f-s more stuff up and the Dems increase by 12 or more points, you could see 100 seats flip. One of the problems with the GOP gerrymander is that it was predicated on the Dems never being able to outperform the GOP by 8 points or more. Lots of GOP seats were set up to be R+9 or so. They keep it to 5 points, and they might not lose any seats. They keep it under 8, and they lose 25-30 seats. But at 10, they lose 50, and at 12 they lose 100. And another problem. The GOP coalition was predicated on Country Club Republicans never voting for Democrats. In 2016 many voted for the Libertarian. Since then, you've seen many Country Club Republicans actually crossing over and voting for Democrats. The GOP gerrymandering model might be broken.

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And this should scare the heck out of any Trumper. If the election were held today, I think the GOP is in the 8-10 percentage loss range. And remember, that's BEFORE any of these investigations start, before Manafort goes on trial in September, before any number of other ill-considered eruptions like Trumps response to Charlottesville occur, before more Trump scandals just bubbling underneath the surface come to light, before Trump tries to stop all oversight and investigation of his administration by firing Mueller/Rosenstein, before Trump starts a war without consulting our military with a tweet. There a reason that 39 House Republicans have decided to pack it in (so far - over 15% of their entire delegation - a huge number). They've seen their internal polls (the ones they believe in), some of them have probably seen some of the investigation stuff we haven''t, they've seen the chatter on the hill by their trusted sources. And they're running for the exits.

(04-12-2018 09:58 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 09:56 AM)VA49er Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 09:50 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 06:24 AM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  No melt down here. Our revenge will come in November. I'll play mostly fair until then - mostly.....

Yea, November is coming. But there's always the Rasmussen Poll to keep them warm at night.

And in just 14 short months, the Iowa and South Carolina straw polls for Trumps replacement will be starting up.

lol, from what I hear, the MSM is pushing this "Blue Wave" narrative. Let's see if folks start running with it. If so, the MSM has done it's job. Again.

Well its been largely backed up by actual elections and turnout numbers since Trump won the Electoral College. I'm not sure its just a narrative.

The last few. The first 4 or 5 showed the opposite. Democrats were doing worse than Hillary.

Dont we have a thread about the same thing somewhere on the board, and if my mind serves me correctly, wasnt it started by tom also?

(04-12-2018 10:10 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 09:58 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 09:56 AM)VA49er Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 09:50 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 06:24 AM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  No melt down here. Our revenge will come in November. I'll play mostly fair until then - mostly.....

Yea, November is coming. But there's always the Rasmussen Poll to keep them warm at night.

And in just 14 short months, the Iowa and South Carolina straw polls for Trumps replacement will be starting up.

lol, from what I hear, the MSM is pushing this "Blue Wave" narrative. Let's see if folks start running with it. If so, the MSM has done it's job. Again.

Well its been largely backed up by actual elections and turnout numbers since Trump won the Electoral College. I'm not sure its just a narrative.

The last few. The first 4 or 5 showed the opposite. Democrats were doing worse than Hillary.

You are correct that in a very small number of the special elections held since 2016, most of them right after the election, the GOP did increase their percentage over Trump vs Clinton. Two were in Georgia. One was an increase from 73 to 75 percent in a South Georgia state legislative special. Another was by single digits in Georgia's Congressional race way back in early 2017. Another was in a 75% Republican district in rural Tennessee. We're seeing some slight increase in Trump/GOP support in highly Dem districts in the Northeast (although that didn't materialize against Connor Lamb)

Basically, in swingish districts, where the margin is within 12 percentage points, I'm only aware of 1 district where the Dem percentage fell significantly, and that was in the Ossoff/Handel Congressional race in early 2017.

----

And beyond the special elections, there have been two sets of general elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The Dems romped in both of them, and did especially well in Virginia.

I think the Roy Moore election was kind of an outlier, only important to show that the GOP can lose anywhere with a Trumpian candidate under the right circumstances. I think the Connor Lamb election was more instructive, as well as the special election in Florida's 72nd House District. If you'd like, you can add in the Ossoff/Handel Congressional race too.

As far as a what a Democratic wave might look like, I think that the Virginia legislative elections were pretty instructive. Basically, the Dems, who were running on a ticket with a bland candidate, took double digit seats. But it wasn't even. They did increase over Trump everywhere, but they demolished the GOP in previously GOP areas that had higher minority percentages, higher average education levels, and higher incomes. BTW, the Dems did NOT take over the state legislature (coming 100 votes - not seats - short). And it wasn't just in Northern Virginia either. And the flipped Virginia seats look a lot like the five endangered GOP congressional seats in Orange County, five GOP districts in Texas, three districts in NY, four in Pennsylvania, 4 in New Jersey, 5 in Florida, as well as other seats. That doesn't include endangered Republicans with very large minority populations like Valdao in California, Hurd in Texas, or the Open McSally district in Arizona. Now, the Dems arent' going to take all of them (but if they take half of them, they take over - in Virginia they took 90% of the districts similar to those listed above).

A special election in a 70%+ Republican or Democratic seat isnt as relevant as a flipped or marginal seat. But it can show turnout and interest in voting.

(04-12-2018 10:11 AM)UTSAMarineVet09 Wrote:  Dont we have a thread about the same thing somewhere on the board, and if my mind serves me correctly, wasnt it started by tom also?

Actually, I don't start a lot of threads. But fair enough.

What's your opinion on Governor Greitens?

It's a bad look either way. I get that he doesn't want to "look" guilty by stepping down, but sometimes you have to take one for the team.

(04-12-2018 11:32 AM)49RFootballNow Wrote:  It's a bad look either way. I get that he doesn't want to "look" guilty by stepping down, but sometimes you have to take one for the team.

I think that the appearance of feeling sorry for Gov Greitens is misplaced. At a minimum, he committed adultery while running as a family values candidate. Even if the charges are bogus, and a grand jury and pretty much every Republican with oversight here has said the claims appear to be credible, didnt Gov Greitens bring this on himself?

Is adultery sufficient to force resignation? Democrats didn't think so with Clinton doing it with an employee-while on the job.

As for Virginia, while the Democrats gained, the Republicans still control the Virginia House.

Connor Lamb is about as atypical a Democrat as you can get. Democrats usually don't run pro gun vets who don't hate Trump. If they ran a bunch like that, Republicans would be in trouble as they wouldn't be able to dominate the independent vote. But there are going to be very few Connor Lambs, if any. I probably would have voted for Jim Gilmore over Trump, but he had as close to zero support among the Democrats as you can get.

As for New Jersey, Chris Christie with Bridgegate, made Trump and Clinton both look enormously popular by comparison. The Republicans knew NJ was hopeless this time.

(04-12-2018 01:02 PM)bullet Wrote:  Is adultery sufficient to force resignation? Democrats didn't think so with Clinton doing it with an employee-while on the job.

As for Virginia, while the Democrats gained, the Republicans still control the Virginia House.

Connor Lamb is about as atypical a Democrat as you can get. Democrats usually don't run pro gun vets who don't hate Trump. If they ran a bunch like that, Republicans would be in trouble as they wouldn't be able to dominate the independent vote. But there are going to be very few Connor Lambs, if any. I probably would have voted for Jim Gilmore over Trump, but he had as close to zero support among the Democrats as you can get.

Sure...

But Republicans in the Virginia House went from holding 66 seats down to 51 seats.

IIRC, the GOP majority came down to a tiebreaker.

Democrats may well gain control of the House this fall. Given what seats are up this time, it would be difficult for them to gain control of the senate. In fact, I think it is probably more likely that the republican majority in the senate increases. I think a very real possibility is democrats controlling the house with republicans going up to 52, 53, or even 54 senate seats. Since I prefer gridlock to either party's stated agenda at this point, that would be fine with me.

Here is what I want to see. I want some party to come out for Bismarck universal PRIVATE health care, a guaranteed minimum income following either Milton Friedman's negative income tax or the Boortz-Linder prebate/prefund approach, paid for by a consumption tax that also generates enough additional revenues to balance the budget and to permit flattening and broadening and lowering income tax rates to world class levels or below. I would also favor a more non-interventionist (not isolationist, North Korea is isolationist, Switzerland in non-interventionist) foreign policy and a stronger military, but one that never gets involved in a war that we don't intend to win, or even more importantly, one where we don't even know which side we want to win. Basically I want the biggest, baddest military in the world, by leaps and bounds, but one that we never have to use because nobody dares pick on us and we don't go picking on anyone else. I don't see either party anywhere remotely close to any of that, and as long as that's the case, we can't have too much gridlock.

(04-12-2018 03:27 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Democrats may well gain control of the House this fall. Given what seats are up this time, it would be difficult for them to gain control of the senate. In fact, I think it is probably more likely that the republican majority in the senate increases. I think a very real possibility is democrats controlling the house with republicans going up to 52, 53, or even 54 senate seats. Since I prefer gridlock to either party's stated agenda at this point, that would be fine with me.

Here is what I want to see. I want some party to come out for Bismarck universal PRIVATE health care, a guaranteed minimum income following either Milton Friedman's negative income tax or the Boortz-Linder prebate/prefund approach, paid for by a consumption tax that also generates enough additional revenues to balance the budget and to permit flattening and broadening and lowering income tax rates to world class levels or below. I would also favor a more non-interventionist (not isolationist, North Korea is isolationist, Switzerland in non-interventionist) foreign policy and a stronger military, but one that never gets involved in a war that we don't intend to win, or even more importantly, one where we don't even know which side we want to win. Basically I want the biggest, baddest military in the world, by leaps and bounds, but one that we never have to use because nobody dares pick on us and we don't go picking on anyone else. I don't see either party anywhere remotely close to any of that, and as long as that's the case, we can't have too much gridlock.

amen brother