I’m going to throw up a few non-GG, non-Manning posts today for the non-cognoscenti (like me). Nate Cohn has a fascinating piece on Georgia’s changing demographics, Michelle Nunn’s chances, and just how must Republicans have to dominate the white vote in GA to win elections:
Romney won Georgia by just 7.8 points–about the same margin that Obama won Wisconsin or Minnesota, and less than Obama’s margin in traditional battlegrounds like New Mexico and Michigan. The margin of victory was just 300,000 votes. Georgia’s Republican lean can’t survive another net-1.1 million new non-white residents over the next decade unless the GOP significantly broadens its appeal. Even in the short term, the white share of the electorate could drop down to 58 or 59 percent by 2016—which could allow a Democrat to win with as little as 23 or 24 percent of the white vote. That’s the range where a Democrat might win without a GOP meltdown. John Kerry won 23 percent of the white vote in 2004, so did President Obama in 2008. Jim Martin’s 26 percent would yield a slight but clear victory.
[….]Winning an open seat in Georgia wouldn’t be as sweet for Democrats as beating Mitch McConnell. Blue Georgia doesn’t sound as nice as Blue Texas, either. That’s probably why we don’t hear as much about Georgia. But a Senate seat is a Senate seat and Georgia’s 16 electoral votes would make it the largest red-to-purple state since Florida lurched toward the Democrats in the 1990s. If Nunn runs well and the GOP nominates a problematic candidate, pay attention.
Georgia’s an interesting state, because it has a batshit crazy Republican party but also has a real city in it along with rapidly changing demographics. It’s not Mississippi (in fact the only time my friends there called me a Yankee asshole was when I said something comparing Georgia and Alabama), but the Republican party acts like it is.
Tone In DC
In my humble opinion, Georgia is about as blue as Newt Gingrich’s neck.
Just sayin’.
As for the electoral prospects of Ms. Nunn, more power to her. The sound of winger heads exploding if she’s victorious will be audible in northern Siberia.
schrodinger's cat
DougJ@top (more about the DREAM act and Goodlatte, that you blogged about yesterday)
More on Goodlatte’s remarks about the Dreamers, from Greg Siskind’s* blog that I read for immigration issues. He thinks it is a bad idea.
Plus heartless republicans are heartless.
* He is an immigration lawyer.
chopper
lol. blue nun. “the wine so bad it made the news”.
The Red Pen
On the subject of beating McConnell, I watched Matt Bevin’s speech at the Red State Gathering.
It was chock full of the usual bullshit, but Bevin is funny, telegenic, and well-spoken. He managed to deliver his blows without looking like much of an asshole. I think McConnell will go down, but it will be during the primary to Bevin and I think Bevin will win the general, unless the Dems come up with Kentucky Jesus or something.
Cris (without an H)
Hey Georgia, we remember who you sent to the White House. We still believe there’s hope for you.
raven
I’ve sent this to a couple of BJ regulars but I think it is a good read.
The New(er) South by Patterson Hood from Drive By Truckers.
SFAW
Wait – is this Balloon Juice or not? FDL maybe?
And take something to settle your stomach, it might keep you from puking.
Oh, wait …
MattF
I think the flat-out racism of Southern Republicans will bring out the non-white vote in 2014, the question is whether Dems will get their act together and be mean enough about it– and call a spade a fucking shovel. We shall see.
Jeremy
@The Red Pen: I wouldn’t discount Grimes. She could very well win there and it wouldn’t be the first time a Democrat won in a red state (examples: North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri, Montana). The state does elect Democrats on a local level.
Anoniminous
Without Obama on the ticket black voter participation in Georgia will probably drop. See black turnout in the 2008 presidential election and the 2008 senate run-off held several weeks later. The GOP won that election. If blacks had turned out in the same number the Dem would have won.
Jeremy
@MattF: I doubt that 2014 will be a replay of 2010. The economy will be in much better shape, Obama is termed out, and people are really getting pissed off at the GOP and their antics. Polls currently show the GOP losing support among older voters, and the Tea Party are talking about sitting out 2014 because they are disappointed in the GOP. Like I said before 2010 was the best chance the republicans had and as the economy improves things won’t look good in 2014 and 2016.
piratedan
hard to say, but I support anyone working to keep an idiot like Broun from holding a senate seat. So instead of being a defeatist, you get down in the trenches and work the phones, register the voters and get your message out door to door if you have to.
Villago Delenda Est
Liebfraumilch. What the Germans export to the Americas to get it the heck out of the Fatherland.
dedc79
@raven: and a great band too. Love their song “The Day John Henry Died” and their newer albums aren’t band either.
Jeremy
@Anoniminous: It didn’t really matter if black turnout was higher because Martin wasn’t going to win. Turnout is usually always lower in runoff elections and special elections. Even in 2010 black turnout was not an issue.
Georgia is clearly trending blue and could turn in 2016. The Democrats also have a good chance of winning the governor’s seat following the next election.
Davis X. Machina
Dupe. Self-delete.
Davis X. Machina
I’ll take Broun, or whomever the GOP nominates, and give the points.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat:
From your second link:
“We just need to work on our messaging! That’s the ticket!”
raven
@dedc79: They add a great deal to the community. They play here this weekend (or next) but you won’t be able to get near the joint.
raven
@Davis X. Machina: If we have a chance it would be by him being the nominee.
Scotty
You play for the Yankees?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
The Republican party acts like every State is Mississippi. That’s one of their many problems. Another one of their many problems is that they want to turn every other State into Mississippi.
? Martin
Actually, George Bush Sr. carried CA in 1988 and CA was a reliably red state prior to that thanks to both Reagan and Nixon. In 1992 it slipped blue and has become one of the most reliably blue states in the country – much more so than Florida.
But yes, Georgia is coming along.
raven
@? Martin: Um we had a democratic governor from 1872 until 2003 when that stupid fucking Roy Barnes pissed off the teachers and went down in flames to Sonny.
low-tech cyclist
I noticed that Georgia wasn’t exactly landslide GOP territory in 2012, despite the Dems’ basically bypassing it. It’s not purple yet, but it’ll get there soon enough. It’s hardly a tossup for 2014, but I’d agree with Cohn that at this early point, Nunn’s got a better shot than Grimes in KY or Davis in TX.
And Georgia is worth some serious attention and help from the national Democratic party. With 16 EVs, it’s growing its way into the ranks of the big states. It’s worth making a push for Nunn in 2014 in order to make GA a credible opportunity for the 2016 Dem Presidential nominee. If GA is in play in 2016, whoever the GOP nominee is will have to really thread the needle to have a chance to win.
Tripod
Peeling off white women is the key to these southern state wides.
To have any chance, Nunn needs the sort of nutty slut shaming candidate that kept Claire McCaskill in the Senate.
shortstop
Come home, Georgia; all is forgotten. Except for Paul Broun, Saxby Chambliss, Rob Woodall, Tom Graves, Tom Price, Lynn Westmoreland, Phil Gingrey, Sue Everhart…wait, wait, I’m being churlish. All will be forgiven if you go blue, honest Abe.
Anoniminous
@Jeremy:
I remember running the numbers and coming to the stated conclusion the day after the special election. The procedure I used has slipped my brain.
Any ethnic group is more likely to vote when a perceived member of that group is on the ticket. I worked on a campaign where we got a statistically significant uptick in votes from Italian dominated precincts which was incomprehensible until some bright spark (not me) made the point our candidate’s last name ended in a vowel. At which point light dawned: low information Italian voters assumed our candidate was Italian. He wasn’t.
Nationally, AA vote increased to ~60% in 2008 and 2012 or roughly 10 points higher than historic norms . Given demographic factors the total AA may very well increase in Georgia in 2014 – I don’t know enough to state one way or the other – but the voter percentage rate will most likely decrease as loosely attached vote drops unless GOTV operations are intensified.
raven
@Tripod: Like I said, my congressman is ready and waiting.
raven
@shortstop: You forgot Karen Handel
Davis X. Machina
@raven: Probably would have happened anyways, The Dixiecrats were dying off, the exurbs were booming, and the GOP was becoming the official regional party, like the Bloc Québécois .
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
When you aren’t allowed to change the product, the only thing you can do is market it better.
raven
Our local music rag handicaps Georgia
“That may be the most interesting survey result of all: Gen. William T. Sherman has a favorable rating twice as high as Honey Boo Boo among Georgians. Who would have guessed it?
Keywords
Senate, Saxby Chambliss, Phil Gingrey, Paul Broun, Jack Kingston, Karen Handel, Michelle Nunn, Hillary Clinton, gun control, same-sex marriage, evolution, Paula Deen, William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War, Honey Boo Boo
More by Tom Crawford
see more…”
The Red Pen
@Jeremy:
I’m not quitting before the fight, but I do want to see some promising polls, etc.
MattF
Via TPM, Louisiana Republicans are evenly divided on whether Bush or Obama is more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/161910086/PPP-Louisiana-poll-August-2013
Yes, that’s right, what your lying eyes are seeing there, Hurricane Katrina.
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina: What do you make of many of your Maine Republicans’ newfound fervor for “libertarianism”? The journey of a thousand miles, I know, I know, except that I suspect not one of them will get past a single step, and they’ll backtrack the second it’s politically feasible to do so.
Splitting Image
I can’t find the link, but I remember seeing a graphic on Nate Silver’s old blog that showed Georgia as being a solidly Democratic state under the age of 60. Not exactly Massachusetts, but not all that different from Pennsylvania. The 60+ demographic, on the other hand…? Let’s put it this way, if you were white and had gotten through high school before the Civil Rights Act passed, you weren’t voting for “that one”.
Georgia is most likely trending Democratic at this point even without the effects of immigration, and with it, the change will just happen faster. I think a lot of it is the fact that the G.O.P. platform is relentlessly anti-urban, and one thing that the larger states all have in common is the presence of big cities. It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore whether a state’s population is anchored by Boston or Atlanta or Salt Lake City, the inner city is where you will find the Democrats. The larger the state, the more likely it is that the urban dwellers will outnumber the rural people, so all of the larger Republican states are trending Democratic. This will probably continue until the G.O.P. develops a new platform that supports the right of at least some cities to exist, or until more cities start collapsing like Detroit and New Orleans. States with declining urban centres seem to be the Republicans’ most fertile ground right now.
shortstop
@Roger Moore: You’re overlooking the bona fide value add! We put high-quality condiments on this doody sandwich.
Roger Moore
@low-tech cyclist:
Why do you think they’re putting so much effort into voter suppression. The voting share of Real Americans has been shrinking and the share of Those People has been growing to the point that the Republicans are in real trouble. They’re stuck with two choices. Choice one is to broaden their appeal and try to get enough of Those People’s votes to keep winning. They’re going with choice two, which is to try to keep Those People from voting.
GregB
Don’t forget the old Dixie North in New Hampshire. We were once the most Republican state in the union back in the 80’s and 90’s.
NH also was the winning margin for George W. with our 4 measly electoral votes in 2000.
Since then it was the only state to switch against W in 2004 and went for Obama both times with the notable tea-bagger landslide in 2010 and concurrent backlash in 2012.
We now boast the first ever all female Congressional delegation in US history with 3 Dems and one GOPer.
hoodie
There may be more near term hope for GA than NC. The difference between GA and the rest of the Southeast is that Atlanta is one huge city. The other southeastern states have nothing comparable (Charlotte’s MSA is half that size, and half of it is in SC). Wingnuts have had more time to wear out their welcome in GA in a pretty dominant Atlanta media market, and now they’re rejecting established guys like Chambliss and Isaakson for wackos like Paul Broun and Gingrey. Chambliss is an asshole, but probably not insane.
Obama did better in NC than GA in 2012, but I wonder if that may be more because they put more effort in NC than any innate characteristics of the electorate. GA and NC have comparable Hispanic populations, but GA has a larger AA population and a slightly younger population. Does anyone have any idea what resources Dems put into GA in 2008 and 2012?
AliceBlue
@raven:
If I remember correctly, Georgia is the only state that did not have a single Republican governor in the 20th century.
? Martin
@raven: And West Virginia still has the highest gap of registered Democrats to Republicans – more than Massachusetts or Vermont.
State attitudes toward party representation at the state level often misalign with the federal level.
Alex S.
Grimes and Nunn are the best candidates the Dems had to offer. The rest is up to the voters. Let’s hope for the best…
I think Georgia was the second-closest red state in 2012, next to North Carolina, ahead of Missouri and Arizona. If the Obama team had made an effort they could have made it a little closer. And if the national mood is a little better in 2016, Georgia could get really close…
Roger Moore
@Splitting Image:
I think a key feature is that the Republican anti-government stance looks dumber the bigger a city you’re in. When you live in a low density rural or exurban area, you can imagine you’re a hardy, self-sufficient person who can do everything yourself, and that it’s more important to have the freedom to do as you choose than to keep the neighbors under control. When the neighbors share your walls, floor, and ceiling, the necessity of rules backed up with government force to keep everyone under control is a lot more obvious.
raven
@AliceBlue: Of course the dems were no prize. Carter was a total asshole to the anti-Vietnam folks.
catclub
@? Martin: Isn’t there some notable anti-immigrant (latino) law that was passed around that time, which has, ever since, sealed the fate of the GOP in CA.
Was it Pete Wilson who stated just that thesis?
PeakVT
@MattF: The fact that so many “liberal” people got that wrong makes me question the utility of polling in general.
Or maybe I should start praying harder for the meteor.
SiubhanDuinne
@Anoniminous:
My last name ends in a vowel, and nearly everyone I meet assumes it is Italian. It’s actually Irish.
raven
@? Martin: True dat
Xantar
@MattF:
Obama is not just a weather wizard who can send hurricanes to New Jersey in order to get the Republican governor to say nice things about him. He’s also a Time Lord!
catclub
@Tripod: Important point! So far, the war on women is the basic GOP message, since they cannot presently lower federal taxes.
EconWatcher
@Roger Moore:
That’s an interresting and perceptive comment.
JR
The other thing to keep in mind about Georgia is that, relatively speaking, it is pretty cheap to campaign there. One major media market dominates, while the outlying ones are very affordable. And most of the cities with significant populations are already Democratic. Let’s take 2004 as an example, since the Kerry campaign did zero campaigning in the state (Edwards flew in for one rally and one fundraiser, both next to the airport, then left), and the Senate nominee that year (whom I worked for) had no money to speak of, either. Even with no investment in the state, a GOP governor, and a weak ballot, Kerry still won Atlanta, Macon, Athens, Savannah, Columbus, Albany, and Augusta.
catclub
@Xantar: The response to Katrina is continuing. There are programs to clear abandoned houses, and to raise houses in flood zones. Also to rebuild ( or Not)
Charity Hospital. There is more than just sept 2005 to the Katrina response, and I would not be surprised if the questions were asking about the recent programs that are ongoing.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
That’s the story, but I’m not at all convinced it’s true. The anti-immigrant law in question was Prop 187, which was supposed to make it illegal to provide any government service to illegal immigrants. The governor, Pete Wilson, pushed it as part of his 1994 reelection campaign in an attempt to drive Republican turnout, there was a big public backlash among Latinos, and the rest is history.
But if you think about it, if California had been solid Republican, the governor wouldn’t have felt the need to juice turnout to guarantee his reelection. If the party hadn’t already been unified around hating brown people, targeting illegal immigration wouldn’t have been such a sure winner. The whole Prop 187 battle was just one noteworthy part of a long-term trend. It might have made things a bit worse for the Republicans in the long term, but the only way they were going to be able to buck the demographic trend was to change their political strategy and try courting Latino voters rather than trying to boost the white vote.
Villago Delenda Est
@GregB:
Mind you, this is despite an infusion of Glibertarian fucktards eager to make NH the “laboratory of Libertarianism”.
pseudonymous in nc
I dispute that claim. Atlanta isn’t a real city. It is a small urban core surrounded by a seven-layer dip of sprawl.
I do think the metro Atlanta political dynamic is changing gradually, but there’s still a heavy presence of people who believe that they need guns to protect themselves from Those People in the city who want to rape their lawn tractors and steal their women.
Villago Delenda Est
@Xantar:
This has been known ever since he went back to 1961 and planted his own birth announcements in the Honolulu papers.
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est: “despite an infusion of Glibertarian fucktards” … you mean the ones who believed there were enough to make a difference, and actually moved? I think the NH real estate agents among the libertarians call them, ‘the suckers’.
raven
@JR: I assume you know Jane?
Roger Moore
@EconWatcher:
I live in the Los Angeles area, and I’ve been here for long enough to see the air quality get drastically better. When the simple act of breathing without discomfort requires detailed, strictly enforced regulations, the basic premise that government only screws stuff seems patently ridiculous.
Jewish Steel
@shortstop:
Shortstop, Chairman Of Voter Outreach
raven
@pseudonymous in nc: what ever
catclub
@Roger Moore: “But if you think about it, if California had been solid Republican, the governor wouldn’t have felt the need to juice turnout to guarantee his reelection. If the party hadn’t already been unified around hating brown people, targeting illegal immigration wouldn’t have been such a sure winner. ”
You probably have better, and much closer view of the CA GOP and its troubles, but I am reminded of the places that ran anti-gay-marriage amendments in 2004 to juice George Bushes re-election.
It was places like Indiana and Mississippi ( as well as Ohio). That makes me think there are irrational, unexplainable bits, even if the GOP is confident of winning.
catclub
@Roger Moore: “and I’ve been here for long enough to see the air quality get drastically better”
Just think, If the air gets good enough, for long enough, the Supreme Court will declare those clean air laws unconstitutional!
Roger Moore
@pseudonymous in nc:
New York has a dense core in the city itself surrounded by suburbs that cover large parts of southern New York, northern New Jersey, and a lot of Connecticut. Los Angeles has a dense core in the downtown-Santa Monica axis and suburbs that sprawl so badly people commute over mountain ranges taller than anything east of the Mississippi to get there. San Francisco has the city itself plus some dense areas in Alameda County, and then sprawl that extends to the Central Valley. Etc. Etc. Etc. Please point to a large American city that doesn’t have way more sprawl than dense urban core.
raven
@Roger Moore: Thank you.
shortstop
@Jewish Steel: ???? That expression is about Lincoln. It was his nickname.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
Yup. It’s classic Republican no-regulation ever thinking. If regulations are ineffective, we should get rid of them because they don’t work. If they are effective, we should get rid of them because they’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@catclub:
Wilson was all for immigration reform as Senator until he got elected governor and then started harping on the Hispanics. Between that, poisoning our water supply for Arco, trashing the school system and the whole energy mess Wilson pretty much singlehandly destroyed the Cal GOP.
Needless to say Wilson has an AM radio show now.
Villago Delenda Est
@SiubhanDuinne:
You must be one of those Sicilian Irish. The O’Corelones, for example.
ranchandsyrup
Was in a meeting with a legislator yesterday and we were making small talk about his Reagan memorabilia and bowl of jelly bellies and that he’s a civil war buff. He took up most of our meeting advancing the theory that Lincoln barely beat the confederacy to the emancipation proclamation (“They were gonna do it!!”) and such. I kept trying to segue back to the issue but he wouldn’t let it go until I noted that the CSA Constitution specifically prohibited it and all he could say was that there was a significant minority that wanted to and if they did this country would be so much better off. It’s nice that he has fantasies but it was a bit disheartening on a few levels.
Needed to vent.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
Yeah, those people. I actually know of one…he was a guy who came in to be Executive Director of a non-profit ISP I helped build up, and over the course of 12 months destroyed it. Then he packed up and headed to New Hampshire to find something else to destroy in the name of his fucked up “philosophy” of ME ME ME ME.
scav
@Roger Moore: Edge cities complicate things between those examples, and then there’s the whole mental thing of suburbs that think urban and suburbs that think anti-city. Oak Park isn’t Barrington.
shortstop
@ranchandsyrup: This is really one of my pet peeves with these revisionist fucks. Every single confederate state’s articles of secession, none of which have actually been read by said fucks, identified he preservation of slavery as the or a major reason for leaving the union. If they were “gonna do it,” they wasted a hell of a lot of life, health, wealth and autonomy getting from point A to point B.
Villago Delenda Est
@ranchandsyrup:
More of that post-Appomattox revisionism that is so popular in the South ever since, well, Appomattox. The entire “it was about tariffs, it was about “state’s rights” gang.
Funny how “state’s rights” never seemed to apply to the mandatory return of fugitive slaves.
shortstop
@scav: For more reasons than the fake half-timbering!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Xantar:
In the conservative universe the list of American presidents is
1977-1981 Jimmy Carter (D- Satan)
1981-1989 Ronald Maximus (founding father of the US)
1989 – 1991 G H Bush (R- the good Bush)
1991- 1998 Bill Clinton’s evil twin (D – hound dog)
1998 – 2004 Bill Clinton the real one (R – don’t believe your lying eyes)
2004- present Barrack “Osama Ben Biden” Obama (D- Al Quida and American Nazi Party)
It’s the Lame stream media who came up with this fictional “President George W Bush” to try cover up Obama’s impeachable crimes like the Iraq War, Finical Crises and Hurricane Katrina
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: The lady I live with who is from Appomattox doesn’t believe that!
TriassicSands
@Alex S.:
And now NC is passing some of the most egregious voter suppression laws in the US. NPR did a report on them the other day and after letting a Republican legislator make a fool of himself on air by proclaiming he didn’t know a single person (in his county) who didn’t have acceptable photo ID, NPR came back with actual facts — 300,000 residents of NC lack acceptable photo ID. I thought, of course you don’t know anyone without valid ID, because the only people you know are middle class and above white people. There is a strong bias in this country against the poor and it is most visible in the opinions of Republicans, especially country club types like former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor who couldn’t understand why anyone would have had difficulty with the butterfly ballot in Florida in 2000. Hers could be seen as a kind of benign ignorance (with very bad side effects), while in case of the NC legislator it’s probably just plain old racism.
I saw a video the other day of a confrontation between the lone Democratic commissioner on a local NC election board and the two Tea Bagger election commissioners. The two, in violation of the Open Meetings law had colluded to put in place new rules aimed primarily at suppressing the vote at the local community college. The extreme partisanship of the rules was obvious, and although the Democratic commissioner is fighting the good fight, she’s going to lose to the two-Tea Bagger majority unless the courts intervene. And, of course, who sits in final judgment? John Roberts and the Fab Four who made this crap possible in the first place..
Belafon
@ranchandsyrup: I’ve added the Cornerstone speech from the confederate VP to my list of things I pull out when someone starts this “War of Northern Agression” and “secession wasn’t about slavery” crap.
Villago Delenda Est
@raven:
Can you be specific? I cited several items…all of them?
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: She’s a liberal, she knows the score!
shortstop
@Belafon: Yep, that’s a good one, too.
Villago Delenda Est
@raven:
I would expect no less of the lifelong female companion to a fellow veteran such as yourself.
dmsilev
@ranchandsyrup: Well, to be fair, there was a small minority of Southern whites that thought freeing the slaves was a decent idea. They tended to go North and enlist in the Union Army.
raven
@Villago Delenda Est:Politics and dogs are the glue. . .
dww44
@piratedan: Thanks. Exactly the template by which we should operate. I’m one of those Georgians and I plan on working for Michelle Nunn at this point, even tho she’s Democratic lite by my standards.
Enough of the defeatist and cynical attitudes. You can’t be a cynic and be a successful elected politician. Certainly not in the beginning.
raven
@dmsilev:
catclub
@TriassicSands: It really should be Holder’s first (or second) case for bail-in on the Voting Rights Act preclearance sections.
I hope it will be killed, or the minority voters will react strongly. We shall see.
Chris
@? Martin:
Yes, I’ve noticed that. What was it that made California so red until the nineties (in contrast to the other big industrialized coastline in the country)?
raven
@dww44: It’s the best we have right now.
dww44
@raven: According to a lifelong classmate a couple of days ago, Tom Price has told her that Karen Handel will win the GOP Senatorial primary because the Atlanta metropolitan/suburban area has the GOP votes and will determine who gets the nod and in his book that’s Karen Handel. If she wins, that will not be good news for an untried, although pedigreed, female Democratic candidate. Too bad John Lewis won’t run.
ranchandsyrup
@dmsilev: Heh. Indeedy.
@Belafon: Thx for the tip. The moar ammo the better. The better the ammo the even betterer. I’m going to revisit the cornerstone speech. It’s crazy that he is still alive and commenting here.
@shortstop: I got a small talkin’ to by the lobbyists for not just nodding like a moron, but that aggression could not stand, man.
catclub
@Chris: Aerospace industries and military installations, perhaps? Keep my taxes low engineers and programmers? Less active latino voters (Texas is still thus).
rdldot
@Roger Moore: And also to split EV count by district which will drown out the city impacts during general elections. They’ll get away with it, too.
gene108
@ranchandsyrup:
That’s a new one.
The only people I’ve met, who made an assertion the South would end slavery based it on the fact that as the industrial revolution progressed, manual slave labor would not be as essential to the economy of the South and therefore slavery would’ve wound down eventually.
I don’t personally buy that argument, because slaves can work just as well in a factory as in a field. I believe some slave owners had started having slaves work in more industrial settings just prior to the Civil War, as industrialization started moving into the South.
raven
@dww44: So an already defeated puke nutcase has a better chance?
jonas
@ranchandsyrup: He took up most of our meeting advancing the theory that Lincoln barely beat the confederacy to the emancipation proclamation
I’ve heard some batshit insane revisionism in my day, but this takes the cake. Jeebus.
Xantar
@catclub:
That seems like a huge stretch, but just to humor your hunch, I went and read the actual poll. PPP simply asked the question: “Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W.Bush or Barack Obama?” The respondents may have decided on their own to interpret it to include all the stuff happening since 2008, but there’s nothing in the question which prompts them to think that way.
piratedan
@dww44: I dunno, it’s not as if she can establish a run on women’s rights plus Nunn can nail her on CEO compensation, there were a whole lotta angry ladies out there that have effectively scuttled the Komen foundation when Ms. Handel took them politically over the cliff and her record got evaluated. She could effectively be categorized as some “rich bitch” that couldn’t even run her charity effectively.
catclub
@Xantar: ” I went and read the actual poll.”
That way lies madness.
I also would agree that 90% of the blame to Obama for the poor response was racism, combined with extremely bad memory. I was considering the last 10%.
ETA: Furthermore, the question wording was ‘the response to Katrina’, which includes all response, 2005-2013.
If the wording were, ‘the response to Katrina in 2005’, then
I would expect a shift in blame away from Obama.
Villago Delenda Est
@Xantar:
Inside their diseased heads, however, is another matter altogether.
JoyfulA
@Villago Delenda Est: I know a couple of libertarians who were talking about moving to the Libertarian Paradise (which they voted on), but none of them did, in the end. The only person I know to have moved to New Hampshire recently is a self-avowed socialist. I think that whole thing about choosing a small state that a few thousand libertarians could dominate didn’t work out too well.
Chris
@ranchandsyrup:
I was in a room with two Proud Southerners recently who were loudly agreeing with each other about that. Except they went even farther and said “people don’t actually realize that there were more abolitionists in the South than in the North!” LOL. Yeah, I don’t doubt it, given that most black people still lived in the South at the time. Too bad Southern abolitionists weren’t allowed to vote.
The other argument was “everyone was on our side internationally – the British, the French, even the Vatican!” Somehow missing the point that all those august bodies found themselves politically unable to actually help the South precisely because of the slavery thing.
@raven:
I’ve read that before, but it still gets me every time. Man, Robert E. Lee was a scumbag.
dww44
@raven: According to my classmate and all the GOP movers and shakers who operate within her and her husband’s ken. Handel got defeated by Deal for governor, but I know many many older female white GOP’ers who voted for her and will vote for her again.
ranchandsyrup
@jonas: He seriously has his timeline wrong, at a minimum. He probably read some shitty book and conflated his recollection with his fantasies.
gene108
@hoodie:
Someone stated up thread that GA had a Democratic governor in 2003. I’d like to point out that NC had a Democratic governor until 2012, as well as still having several state wide elected offices held by Democrats, such as Sec. of State and one U.S. Senator, who is up for re-election this year.
The NC Democratic Party weathered the GOP take over of the South much better than other Southern states, but got held to account by the voters for their good old boy network / style of politics. A lot of the vote that went to the GOP in 2010 and probably 2012 was to “punish” NC Dems for corruption, especially during the Easley’s tenures as governor.
Despite McCrory easily winning the governor’s race, the Lt. Governor’s race was much closer.
With aggressive gerrymandering, I don’t think the state legislature will flip anytime soon. I do think that if the NC Democratic Party can get its act together and put out some new candidates, who are not associated with the Easley-Basnight wing of the Party (i.e. the good old boys), they could take control of the governor’s mansion in 2016 and make a dent in the Republican majority in the state legislature.
Chris
@gene108:
I personally don’t buy the argument for an even simpler reason; the powers that be in the South cared so much about slavery, they were willing to start a fucking war to preserve it (as all their statements of secession will attest).
The idea that emancipation was just around the corner in a context were people were that deeply dedicated to stopping it is hilariously utopian, to put it mildly.
Chris
@JoyfulA:
That’s funny, because I’ve heard about a similar plan that the Aryan Nations groups in the Pacific Northwest were tossing around during the eighties – that all the white supremacist groups in the country should move to the region, and then they’d have enough votes to dominate the legislature and secede from the Union.
Apparently, the idea died before it began, because all the white supremacists in the rest of the country responded with “Okay, but why should WE move THERE? I think YOU should move HERE.”
dww44
@piratedan: Might be a valid viewpoint in your circle of acquaintances, but within mine, Handel has NOT suffered any fallout from her abortion/Planned Parenthood/Komen escapades. Indeed, more white women, middle aged and beyond, don’t have any issues with the anti-abortion and anti-reproductive measures passed by all these GOP legislatures.
Most think that 20 weeks is long enough to decide if an abortion is necessary and that abortion is EVIL EVIL EVIL at its very core. There is no ability to empathize with working class and single mothers .Nor do the former mind depriving them of access to birth control pills and the like, even though their generation was the first to have access to them in the 60’s.
JoyfulA
@gene108: There were lots of slave working in the Virginia shipyards during the Civil War.
Shortstop
@gene108: @jonas: This is actually a popular current theme on the unreconstructed right — you hear it pretty frequently now. Everything was going to get to where it needed to be, but Lincoln and the abolitionists had to get pushy, piss people off and ruin everything. This winning theory is applied beyond slavery to modern civil rights battles, disparaging everyone from uppity women to demanding gheys as not having been patient enough.
I guess we can consider it a warped sort of progress: in constructing their arguments to absolve the confederacy of having been associated with slavery, they’re finally admitting that owning people was a bad thing.
Chris
@gene108:
Interesting. Isn’t that what happened in most of the South in 1994 when the Gingrich Revolution took over a bunch of seats? Voter backlash against Democratic Party corruption and general “throw the bums out” mood, aided and abetted by the fact that Republicans were now just as conservative as Dixiecrats and therefore the tribal injunction against voting Republican had pretty much died?
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
I’m not sure if it would exactly qualify as a “small” minority, either. A lot of whites from Appalachia took the Union’s side, which is why there was so much vicious intra-state fighting in Kentucky and Tennessee, and why there’s West Virginia today. And let’s not forget the slave states that stayed in the Union, either.
Jewish Steel
@shortstop: In the south, that will go over like a lead bag of carpet.
raven
@dww44: Oh, you live in Dunwoody.
Jewish Steel
@Jewish Steel: Which I assumed was your point.
johnny aquitard
To be fair, the republican party acts like every state is Mississippi.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
The tribal injunction against voting for Republicans was on its way out when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. Johnson knew exactly what he was doing, too…writing off the South for at least a generation. It’s turned out to be longer than he feared.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Chris: Yeah, the argument boils down to: We didn’t benefit at all from that free labor, and in fact it actively damaged us, but we were willing to make the sacrifice for the betterment of their race. You gotta have a massive ego and blind spot just as big to make that argument and find it convincing.
Roger Moore
@johnny aquitard:
And their policies seem designed to turn every state into Mississippi.
Suffern ACE
@gene108: In the 1850s, we could not add a single state to the Union without there being some kind of violent revolt. We had all of those western states open up that would have been suitable for agriculture and mining (gee, where would anyone get the idea that slaves would be used in mines). The slave holders were not interested in staying put within those boundaries, but finding new places to insert slaves. But no, it must have been those uncompromising northern states that kept undoing those compromises.
hoodie
@gene108: That may be wishful thinking. The Basnight wing of the NC Dem party may have been what kept them in office while the rest of the south went GOP. In other words, NC didn’t stay dem by having a particularly progressive electorate, they just managed to hold on longer in NC because they had gerrymandered districts in their favor and still controlled levers of power to keep everyone in line. A lot of conservadems in Georgia switched parties around the Gingrich era because it paid to do so. I don’t recall that being the case in NC. I still think the demographics for dems are better in GA than they are in NC.
JR
@raven: Jane who?
catclub
@johnny aquitard: which is pretty reasonable, given that in order to come to the top in any state GOP, you have to win Mississippi ( or its white equivalent) first.
Then you are shaped by your first success.
gene108
@Chris:
I think the whole Red State / Blue State divide gets analyzed through our 2012 world view.
States like NC and VA were Red for Presidential elections, but in the aftermath of the Civil Rights legislation the state Democratic Parties distanced themselves from the “liberal” national Party.
Even after the Gingrich Revolution, in 1994, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, etc. had Democratic Senators, governors, and other state wide office holders into the early 2000’s, for example Max Cleland (D-GA) lost to Chambliss in 2002, which is only 11 years ago and not ancient history yet.
I’ve heard that as state GOP’s made gains at the state level, they started bullying donors to cut off funding to state Democrats. There may be other reason for why state Democratic parties fell apart 10-15 years ago, but despite the South going for Republican Presidential candidates consistently since 1980*, the state level politics in the South were not so one sided until very, very recently.
*Clinton/Gore carried Louisiana in 1992, for example and easily won their home states of Arkansas and Tennessee. Virginia went for Republican Presidential candidates from 1968 to 2008, but still Democrats in Congress, the state and local levels during this time period.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Shortstop: Yeah, except that argument depends on time travel too. Lincoln wasn’t even inaugurated until March – by then at least 7 States had seceded. They left before he even had the chance to get pushy. Chronology puts the lie to the argument that if Lincoln hadn’t been such a tyrant we wouldn’t have had to leave. He hadn’t had a chance to be a tyrant yet.
raven
@JR: Former head of the Dem party in GA. I just figured if you were that wired in you would.
pseudonymous in nc
@Roger Moore:
NYC: 8.3m
NYC MSA: 18.9m
NYC CSA: 22.2m
Atlanta: 450,000
Atlanta MSA: 5.4m
Atlanta CSA: 6m
I’ve seen the sprawl crawl up 316 from Atlanta to Athens over the past 15 years. If you’re comparing Atlanta to LA, then you’re proving my point.
Calouste
@gene108:
Slaves work indeed as well in a factory as in a field. The Nazis employed about 7.7 million “forced laborers” from occupied countries during World War II, mostly in their war industry. My granddad was one of them.
dww44
@raven: Nope, not by a long shot, although I’ve relatives and acquaintances in the northeastern suburbs. I’m just of the same generation as they and most of my interactions are with their sort. Me, personally, I am really blue in a dark sea of red but within the democratic confines of a smaller city south of the Big A.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
I think a big part of what’s happened in the past 20 years, is that the national parties have worked harder to impose ideological discipline from the top down. It used to be that parties were primarily organized at the state level, with state parties adjusting their platforms to try to accommodate the local electorate. Republicans in liberal areas would swing to the left of the national party and Democrats in conservative areas would swing to the right. That gave you Rockefeller Republicans in the Northeast and Dixiecrats in the South. The national party would try to come up with some kind of compromise ideological position for the party platform, and Senators and Representatives were able to cross party lines (bipartisanship!) to vote their ideologies rather than their party line.
Starting with Gingrich and accelerating with Rove, the Republicans have been trying to impose more top-down ideological rigidity. State parties, and especially Congressmen and Senators, are expected to toe the party line. The Democrats have responded by tightening up their ideological ship, though not as drastically as the Republicans have. State parties are now much closer in their ideological outlook, which has resulted in big shakeups at the local level. Conservative states that used to have substantial, if conservative, Democratic parties are now dominated by Republicans with a smaller, but more liberal, Democratic rump. The opposite is happening, albeit more slowly, to the Republican parties in liberal leaning states.
something fabulous
Because he is a friend of a family member, I’ve been wondering about how any GA dems around here feel about this guy: http://www.drrad.us/news.html ?
something fabulous
…and my very first, official: FYWP. Sorry for the link madness. Curious if he’s making any kind of dent!
Chris
@Roger Moore:
… with the Tea Party Movement being the culmination of that “ideological discipline before all other considerations” (see also several East Coast races in 2010 that Republicans lost when by rights they should’ve won).
Thanks to all for the explanations; I knew the South had been leaning Republican at the presidential level but still Democrat at the local level since LBJ, I just thought 1994 was pretty much the end of that and the finalization of the “South = Republican” movement.
Xantar
@catclub:
To be honest, I think you’re overestimating the intelligence of Louisiana Republicans when you say that even 10% of them are thinking things through that much. And besides, even if I grant your interpretation of the wording, in order for someone to think Obama was more responsible for the poor response to Katrina, they would have to think that everything Obama has done since 2008 was cumulatively worse than what Bush did in the immediate aftermath. That’s still not a reasonable response.
However, if you want to grant that much critical thinking to a poll response, then more power to you as you have more faith in humanity than I do.
JR
@raven: Heh, I fled to Florida when Bobby Kahn was still top dog. Up in DC now, working as a communications/fundraising strategist. Talk to me if Doug Stoner becomes DPG chair. :)
gene108
@hoodie:
I didn’t mean to imply a liberal wave will sweep over the NC Democratic Party.
It’s just the old guard Democrats, thanks to the Easley era scandals, are not going to be able to be the elder statesmen of the party anymore.
Basnight brought home the bacon for this district and used to be well thought of. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Same for Jim Hunt. They aren’t people, whose endorsement any up and coming Democrat would seek out in 2013. This wasn’t the case in 2000 and 2004, when Easley got elected governor and re-elected governor by comfortable margins, despite Bush, Jr. carrying the state in the Presidential election by comfortable margins.
My only point was that because of the Easley scandals there needs to be a new guard of Democrats not associated with Basnight, Hunt, etc., because to NC voters the old guard stink of good old boy cronyism. I did not mean to imply these new Democrats would be liberal. I think you’ll have someone closer to Heath Shuler, in a lot of cases, but they would make sure the government functioned, education wasn’t gutted and other basic shit that Republicans no longer want to do.
raven
@dww44: Down below the gnat line!
gene108
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think Democrats really have tightened much up.
It’s just that voters in R+ districts voted out the last remnants of Democrats that held those seats in 2010, at least at the Congressional level and gerrymandering and fear of a Teatard primary opponent will keep those Republicans in line.
If Democrats had tightened up their ideological ship, you might actually see a primary challenge to incumbent Democrats who buck the Party line, but that doesn’t happen. Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) is anti-choice, but he’s not going to get a primary challenge for it.
As long as a Republican can run adds about how Democrat ‘A’ will vote with Nancy Pelosi to enact a liberal San Francisco agenda, the Democratic Party is not going to be able to instill the sort of top-down ideological purity Republicans have adopted.
The true Dixiecrats, i.e. those who were strongly pro-segregation, became Republicans in the 1960’s, when it was clear the Democrats were moving ahead with Civil Rights.
The conservative Democrats, who stuck around were in favor of desegregation or at the worst were not going to stand in the way of programs to help blacks overcome centuries of slavery and segregation, though they weren’t near as liberal as Ted Kennedy on many issues and were probably as much about bringing back the bacon to their districts / states, as anything else.
Roger Moore
@pseudonymous in nc:
Hmm. Having looked up the numbers, I have changed my mind and agree that Atlanta is sprawlier than other big cities in the US. Of the 42 US urban areas with a population over 1 million, Atlanta has the second lowest urban density after Charlotte, and it’s much, much lower than the actually dense urban areas like New York, San Francisco, and LA.
The density list is actually kind of interesting. It looks to me as if, contrary to common perceptions, the densest urban areas are concentrated in the West rather than the East, and especially in California. Just eyeballing the data makes me think that cities in the South tend to have the lowest urban densities, so Atlanta is part of a bigger trend. If you go by population weighted density, Atlanta looks even worse. So yes, the numbers suggest it really is a giant pile of sprawl.
hoodie
@gene108: Yeah, there is no doubt that Easley, Jim Black and, to some extent, Bev Perdue put the NC Dem party in a hole, but where does that new guard come from? My point was that the old guard allowed the NC dems to hold on to power long after the long term GOP trend hit the rest of the south. The GOP has only recently risen to power in NC and the dems may just now be starting their time in the wilderness. That happened ten years ago in GA. You may not have a long term movement toward a new guard of Heath Shuler type or other dems in NC until you have a bigger demographic changes and folks have gotten a good full dose of GOP extremism. Remember, some folks voted for McCrory because they thought he was a moderate, and some still talk about Tillis that way. Hell, I can see some of these wackos thinking Richard Burr is a flaming liberal, let alone Kay Hagan. It may be the best bet of turning the tide is if Hillary runs in 2016 and the dems can field a lot of female candidates and push for some sort of neutral redistricting that will at least get rid of the supermajorities in the state house.
hoodie
@Roger Moore: All of which is irrelevant to the original point. Yes, Altanta sprawls everywhere, but it is the borg, a big consolidated media market that also happens to be the state capital. Contrast with other parts of the south, where you have a bunch of small markets that don’t overlap that much (e.g., Charlotte/Raleigh, Greenville/Columbia/Charleston, Nashville/Chattanooga/Memphis). Most southern states are very decentralized and the state capitals are not culturally dominant, which is advantageous to GOP politics.
gene108
@hoodie:
I don’t think it was/is inevitable NC goes through a period of Democrats being on the outside.
North Carolina had some pride in being a more progressive Southern state, with real investments to develop RTP, the UNC System, and I’ll even through the highway fund for the NC DOT in there as investments in infrastructure.
Virginia would be the model I think NC was/is moving towards, rather than SC.
Million dollar question. I have no idea.
dww44
@raven: Actually, right on it, but as we live north of town in the county we don’t have to spend half the year swatting those annoying critters.
@something fabulous: I’ve seen stuff about him and he received a bit of coverage before Nunn declared. But not much since then. He may become known, but he isn’t as yet. I appreciate the fact that he’s actually in the race.
pseudonymous in nc
@Roger Moore:
The bigger West Coast cities were built for streetcars. In ’97, I remember a sign in Buckhead that had the population of metro Atlanta. Last time I passed it, a year ago, it had doubled. There’s been some building out of the city proper and ITP, but if you can draw a common theme from a decade plus of building out, it’s the creation of a metropolitan area that doesn’t cohere without cars, often deliberately so.
As for NC politics, it’s true that there isn’t an obvious set of Dem political successors to the eastern-state mob, but I also think there’s going to be an appetite for some good-ol-boy normalcy after a few years of the current psychotic break.
BruinKid
@? Martin: It’s interesting to see the percent of the vote the parties got in California over the last couple decades. California was actually one of the closest states that Truman carried, enabling him to laugh at the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline.
1948: Truman 47.57%, Dewey 47.13%, Thurmond 0.03%, Wallace 4.73%
1952: Stevenson 42.27%, Eisenhower 56.83%
1956: Stevenson 44.27%, Eisenhower 55.39%
1960: Kennedy 49.55%, Nixon 50.10%
1964: Johnson 59.11%, Goldwater 40.79%
1968: Humphrey 44.74%, Nixon 47.82%, Wallace 6.72%
1972: McGovern 41.54%, Nixon 55.00%
1976: Carter 47.57%, Ford 49.35%
1980: Carter 35.91%, Reagan 52.69%, Anderson 8.62%
1984: Mondale 41.27%, Reagan 57.51%
1988: Dukakis 47.56%, Bush 51.13%
1992: Clinton 46.01%, Bush 32.61%, Perot 20.63%
1996: Clinton 51.10%, Dole 38.21%, Perot 6.96%
2000: Gore 53.45%, Bush 41.65%
2004: Kerry 54.31%, Bush 44.36%
2008: Obama 61.01%, McCain 36.95%
2012: Obama 60.24%, Romney 37.12%
Goldwater’s extremism still got him almost 41% in California in 1964; that could be considered the right-wing “base” back then. Then in 1976, without the Californian Nixon on the ballot, we were the classic swing state, with Ford eking out a victory but getting less than 50%. And despite Dukakis getting blown out nationally, he didn’t lose by that much to Bush 41.
barontagge
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Can I quote this dude? This is amazing.