brewcrew1000 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:51 pm
If every single Senate seat was up for re-election would the Dems have flipped it or would have held about the same?
My best guess is the Dems would lose 52-48. Voters are too polarized/tribalized right now and there are too many sparsely populated deep red states. In the other two Senate classes, coming up in 2020 and 2022, there are really only three GOP seats that look potentially flippable, at least based on the state's history of going blue in statewide or pres elections (and not really accounting for the incumbent's popularity), and those are CO (Gardner), PA (Toomey), and WI (Johnson). And the Dems will give back AL (Jones). A stronger showing on Tuesday, holding IN and/or MO, would have a) put them in a better starting spot for 2020 and b) suggested they can still compete in red states. Instead they're gonna also lose FL. In light of Tuesday's results, I don't feel confident the Dems will retake the Senate ever again under the current partisan alignment.
Re: Pelosi, I don't think she's going to "help" Trump as much as he apparently thinks. In this election, the one that could actually return her to power, the attack ads didn't really work and pre-election surveys listed her at the very bottom of reasons people cited for their vote, after all the actual issues. I think if Trump tries to run "against" her, it'll fall flat with most voters outside his base (relatedly, at some point he needs to stop railing against Hillary -- the people who go to his rallies eat it up, but how many ordinary voters actually care anymore?). I do think the Dems need to dump Schumer, not because Trump will have much success running "against" him, but because he's an incompetent, bumbling fool, and he failed spectacularly at his one overarching goal, which was to protect vulnerable Dems.
beautyfromashes wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 10:52 am
brewcrew1000 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 9:31 am
I really think all the Dem's need to do to win back the presidency is flip Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania and these are all very likely because a few of the house seats in these states flipped and they are all states that have been affected by the Tariffs.
I think unseating Trump totally depends on the candidate chosen by the Democrats. It seems that strongly Progressive candidates did not fare well last night (TX, GA, FL, etc). If a centrist candidate is chosen from a non coastal state, it’s a lock win. Klobuchar would be my choice.
I think this is overly simplistic and selective sampling. I can just as easily point to a spate of moderate candidates who got wiped out (eg all the Dem Senators who lost, or the string of tepid moderate Dems who lost FL gov races before Gillum came along), and progressives (eg Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin) who won Trump states.
At a local or state level, there just is no one size fits all -- it's not that Dems should run universally moderate, or universally progressive candidates. They need to have a broad platform onto which both moderates and progressives can project their vision, and then run the appropriate candidate for the particular race.
For pres, I think it's actually even less complicated. I feel relatively confident that the states that went for Hillary are generally safe for Dems -- that is, if they had run Bernie instead, I don't think they'd have lost any of Hillary's states. So the vaunted "firewall" turned out to be the marginal Dem states, and they should run someone who can bring those particular states back into the fold. Klobuchar could probably do it, considering the margin she ran up in narrowly Clinton but still very similar Minnesota -- but Brown, who won Ohio pretty easily, probably could too. I know Dems are scaling back on superdelegates after 2016 (and in the interest of democracy, they should), but to whatever extent they decide to put their thumb on the scale in 2020, they should do it paying close attention to the primaries in those upper Midwest states (note that Bernie won the primary in MN, WI, and MI, as well as a bunch of other "conservative"/red states -- ID, MT, WY, ND, IN, WV, and yes, KS, among others). Unless you think a progressive will alienate an already-blue state, the lesson from 2016 and from Tuesday doesn't seem to be that the Dems *must* run a centrist. It's really that Dems need to go back to their pro-labor roots. Whether the pro-labor candidate is otherwise "moderate" or "progressive" on non-labor issues seems to me like it will be somewhat less important.