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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Toot, toot, toot, looking out my back door

Toot, toot, toot, looking out my back door

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This is a BIG poll number in NY-24:

A survey of 785 voters conducted by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, found Balter, D-Syracuse, with a four-point lead, 47 to 43 percent, over Katko, R-Camillus, in the central New York congressional race. Ten percent of voters were undecided.

Cook had this baby as Likely Republican, even though it’s D +3 on the basis of the fact that it’s swung R in midterms recently and Katko is a little slicker than some other Trump enablers. But he’s a Trump enabler to the bone and he needs to be shown the door.

NY-24 starts a few miles from where I live and I am going to try to canvass for Balter. She’s a great candidate who prevailed over the DCCC-endorsed candidate in a tough primary.

Here’s the dealio, as the kid say: prognosticators are overdoing it on the power of incumbency and how much an R benefits from not publicly drooling on himself. I believe Balter will win — you don’t see a lot of challengers with limited name rec with any kind of lead this far out. But this one isn’t on the radar as much as it should be. So it’s a great place to give IMHO.

Goal Thermometer

We’ve got a special in OH-12 this Tuesday. I didn’t fundraise for it because specials attract a lot of money already and I don’t think the psychological effect or a win makes that much different this late, since it won’t encourage more retirements. But here’s hoping Danny O’Connor pulls off a big upset. And make no mistake: this would be a big upset, it’s R +7 and nothing crazy is going on in the race.

Reader Interactions

56Comments

  1. 1.

    Mike in DC

    I wonder what the record is for pickups in a midterm since, say, 1934(i.e., in the “modern era”). 80?

  3. 3.

    smintheus

    785 voters is a big sample size for a single congressional district; that’s more often the size of a state-wide poll. Suggests this good poll result is pretty solid.

  4. 4.

    oldster

    Awesome. I’m next door here in NY-23, and I wonder how Trump-stamp Reed is polling. Better than that, I worry.

  5. 5.

    trollhattan

    @SFBayAreaGal:
    That particular song contains more misheard lyrics than I can count. Combine Fogerty’s chewy drawl, the compressed A.M. radio mono mix and the goofiness of the actual words I’m not surprised. “Tambourines and elephants?”

  7. 7.

    ByRookorbyCrook

    Good news for Balter! I hope to see similar news for Anthony Brindisi in the district next door, who will replace the odious Claudia Tenney.

  9. 9.

    p.a.

    Well it is about an acid trip, right? Leave it to Fogerty to trip about a carnival instead of being 8 miles high. (This comment a blatant plagiarism of Christgau)

  10. 10.

    Marcopolo

    @Mike in DC: Republicans won 71 seats in 1938 and 63 in 2010. Those will be hard numbers to beat. However, I am moderately optimistic we’ll win the seats we need, 23 or 24, for a House majority. The largest number of seats the Ds have won is 48, twice. That will also be a hard number to beat but it is just as good a target as any.

    I’ve been making two contributions to campaigns every Monday. One to a MO state house or senate race and one to a US House race. This past Monday I gave to Jared Golden in ME-02 and Helena Webb in MO-100. I encourage all other BJers to do the same. Remember, you don’t have to give a lot–make a $5 or $10 contribution and challenge all your friends to match you.

    Also, we have our primary in MO next Tuesday. On Wednesday we will know who will be running in the general against Ann Wagner in MO-02 which is the best opportunity we have for flipping a house seat in Missouri (like there is a very slim chance but 3rd tierish–across the river in IL-12 Brendan Kelly running against Mike Bost is a 1st tier pickup opportunity).

    Hope everyone has committed to knocking on some doors or making some calls or doing something for a candidate you like in your area (or region). As Yoda said, there is no try only do or not do or something like that. I am going to a poll watcher training tonight. I’ll anticipate being at a polling location next Tuesday for one of the campaigns I’ve helped out on over the past few months.

  11. 11.

    Elizabelle

    A race to watch in Colorado’s sixth, near Columbine-land. WaPost: The Daily 202: Democrat [Jason Crow] makes gun control a central theme in key House race

    AURORA, Colo. — On the sixth anniversary of a shooting at a movie theater here that left a dozen dead and 70 more injured, a new memorial was dedicated to the victims.

    Jason Crow recalled the July 20 ceremony in an interview at his campaign headquarters six miles down the road. The Democratic nominee against Rep. Mike Coffman (R) has made tough new gun laws a central issue in one of the highest profile House races of 2018, a key test of the issue’s potency.

    “I view my role right now as making sure we don’t have to build any more of those memorials,” Crow said Tuesday night. “I wish we were at a point where we were as good at dealing with the policy to prevent these things as we are at building beautiful memorials to the victims.”

    Columbine High School in Littleton, where two teenagers killed 13 people and then themselves in 1999, is just one mile outside the district’s boundary.

    Affluent, educated, diverse and suburban, the 6th District outside Denver is the archetype of a tough place for a Republican incumbent to survive in the upcoming midterms. Hillary Clinton won it by nine points in 2016, even as Coffman — who refused to support Donald Trump — got reelected by eight points.

    Republicans note that Coffman’s Democratic challengers in 2012, 2014 and 2016 also endorsed stricter gun laws, though perhaps not as vocally as his current opponent. Crow, a former Army Ranger who now practices law, is betting his political future on 2018 being different.

    “It’s something that I feel like we have reached a tipping point on,” he said. “You’ll find plenty of old salty politicos that would say, in a swing district like this, you shouldn’t take on gun violence. I don’t care about that political wisdom anymore.”

    …. While five of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in American history have taken place in the past three years, Crow notes that he’s also chosen to focus on guns because of everyday violence that does not generate headlines or lead to the construction of memorials.

    …. One of Crow’s biggest challenges here is that Coffman is a proven political survivor and well-liked by many in the district. First elected to the state House three decades ago, he was a Marine Corps officer in Iraq during Desert Storm and then did another tour in 2005. He was elected Colorado secretary of state in 2006, even as the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee lost by 17 points in a terrible year for the party.

    Coffman used to be much more conservative when his district was solidly red. (He replaced Tom Tancredo in 2008 when he resigned to run for president.) After the boundaries were redrawn to double the number of Latino voters as part of reapportionment, Coffman learned Spanish and moderated on immigration. He’s been a leading Republican voice in the House for protecting the “dreamers.” He’s also done intensive outreach to the Ethiopian and Asian populations that’s paid dividends.

    Also, Coffman has an A+ rating from the NRA. Hope that proves problematic this year. (Thanks, Maria Butina.)

    I would guess the wind is at Crow’s back in 2018, although

    The West has a long libertarian streak, and historically people who oppose new gun laws tend to be significantly more motivated to vote on the issue than people who support them. After the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, the Democratic-controlled state government enacted new laws to limit the size of magazines and require universal background checks. This galvanized conservative activists to organize recall campaigns against two Democratic state senators, including the state Senate president. Both went down. It was the first successful recall in Colorado history.

    — But this isn’t your grandfather’s Colorado, either. Communities like this have driven the Rocky Mountain State’s transformation from red to purple to bluish.

    Gonna be interesting to see this one play out. WaPost story is worth the click. Beware “starman” in the reader comments, some 2A absolutist or a paid troll. (And why not both?)

  13. 13.

    dmsilev

    @Mike in DC: 70 is about the max since WWII. That was 2010. I graphed the numbers here, plotting shift in the House vs. Presidential approval rating (Gallup, mid-October). Since Big Orange is usually hovering in the low 40s at best in Gallup (he’s at 40 this week), history would suggest that a GOP bloodbath is highly possible though certainly not guaranteed.

    (Edit: Fixed link)

  14. 14.

    raven

    @p.a.: Just got home from Illinois. . .

    and it is
    Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
    Toot toot toot may have been what was happening as he wrote it.

  17. 17.

    raven

    @SFBayAreaGal: And “Closing Time” by the Semisonics is not about booze

    This song has a very literal meaning – being asked to leave a bar – but it goes much deeper than that. Semisonic lead singer Dan Wilson wrote the song when his wife was pregnant with their first child, which turned out to be a daughter named Coco. Halfway through writing the song, he realized it had a double meaning. “It’s all about being born and coming into the world, seeing the bright lights, cutting the cord, opening up into something deeper and more universal,” Wilson told Mojo.

    Shortly before recording was scheduled to begin, Wilson’s wife experienced complications with her pregnancy, and Coco was born three months premature, weighing just 11 ounces. Wilson’s bandmates offered to postpone the sessions, but he asked to move forward with them, since there was very little he could do in the hospital. This song took on a new meaning with the line, “I know who I want to take me home,” as Wilson was looking forward to the day he could bring Coco home.

    That day finally came nearly a year after Coco was born; she left the hospital in February 1998 on the same day “Closing Time” was released as a single. According to Wilson, the ambulance driver who transported them home asked if he was the same Dan Wilson from the band. That’s when the full gravity of the song hit him, and he realized how much Coco influenced i

  18. 18.

    Mike in DC

    @dmsilev:
    Thanks. So, 40+ is basically fantastic, and getting north of 60 awesome. The next question is, what’s our best case, Senate-wise? We may lose Nelson’s seat, but otherwise how many do we have at least a shot at picking up? NV, AZ, TN, TX? Anywhere else?

  23. 23.

    Mike in DC

    @Baud: Probably not, but he’s an incumbent, so a hold is not a pickup. I was trying to think in terms of races where we have a better than 1-5% chance of a pickup.

  28. 28.

    Mike in DC

    5. Our max pickup in the Senate is 5 seats. That requires holding all our seats, and picking up AZ, NV, TN, TX and MS. While the odds in the latter two are steep, we have great candidates in TN, TX and MS. It would set us up nicely for 2020. I would love to have a new Dem president enter office in 2021 with more than 60 in the Dem caucus. Then pass a metric fuckton of good bills.

  29. 29.

    Ruviana

    @raven: And she’s a 20 or 21 year old young woman now! Your friendly reminder that time is passing all the time. :)

  32. 32.

    Marcopolo

    @Lapassionara: Hi L! Btw, I am putting together a list of MO House & Senate seats that are most likely to flip in Nov. based on Dem performance in the previous election. My own micro state Red to Blue list as it were. The idea is to send it around my circle & encourage folks to give to those candidates (most of us live in one of the blue areas in MO & our folks don’t really need the help).

    There are, off the top of my head, two Senate & 12 or so House seats where the D got 40% or more of the vote. I’m waiting for the primary next Tuesday to finish it up w/ links for donating to the candidates in those races—you want me to email you a copy when it is finished?

  33. 33.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:
    One of the things that’s very uncertain is how the big partisan swing will interact with the Republicans’ heavy gerrymandering. They’re something like 20 seats ahead of where they ought to be based only on their percentage of the vote in 2016. That might or might not be a sign in their favor. It’s expected it’ll take a big blue wave to overcome the effects of gerrymandering, and there’s a real risk the coming blue wave won’t be big enough. But gerrymandering works by setting up a few districts with an extreme lean for your opponents and a lot of districts with a moderate lean for you. If the wave is big enough to overcome that moderate lean, the Democrats could have a really huge pickup.

  34. 34.

    Raven

    @Mnemosyne: They were a classic one hit wonder and their drummer, a white dude from Champaign who majored in African American studies at Harvard, wrote a great book “so you want to be a rock and roll star “. About the biz.

  35. 35.

    ? Martin

    I’m curious how the polling holds up in all of this. The challenge is all polling is based on likely voter models, and in really wave elections, the reason the polling is usually wrong is because the likely voter model has made some sort of sudden change that causes the sampling to be fairly off. Now, we’ve gotten much better at this shit, but predicting who’s going to turn out is still a bit of a dark art.

  36. 36.

    JoeyJoeJoe

    @Marcopolo: Dailykos elections has spreadsheets of all presidential results by congressional, state House, and state senate districts. That’s a good place to look if you didn’t know about it. On the congressional level, the only seat that Dems look like they might contest is the second in the St. Louis suburbs

  37. 37.

    Raven

    @Ruviana: Daniel Dodd “Dan” Wilson (born May 20, 1961) is a singer, songwriter, musician, producer, and visual artist. His songwriting resume includes “Closing Time”, which he wrote for his band, Semisonic, “Not Ready to Make Nice” (co-written with the Dixie Chicks) and “Someone like You” (co-written with Adele). He earned a Grammy nomination for “Closing Time” (Best Rock Song) and won Grammys for Song of the Year (“Not Ready to Make Nice” in 2007) and Album of the Year (which he won in 2012 as one of the producers of Adele’s 21).

  38. 38.

    Fair Economist

    @Roger Moore: The wave isn’t going to be big enough to flip gerrymandering. You have to get to something like R+10 before that happens – the gerrymanders are very brutal. At that point it no longer matters, we would have an overwhelming majority anyway.

    What is happening some is that the swing in suburban districts is weakening the gerrymanders.

  40. 40.

    Marcopolo

    @Crebit: Currently rated solid R by two of the folks who rate Congressional races, Cook & Inside Elections, & likely R by Larry Sabato. These raters do continue to shift races towards the Ds (they’ve moved 10 or so that way over the past couple weeks) so who knows where things will stand in Nov but I think based on fundraising & Reed’s competency this is a tough seat to flip. As of June 30, Mitrano had 8K cash on hand, Reed had 1,087K.

  42. 42.

    Marcopolo

    @JoeyJoeJoe: Thanks, I’ve already done all the research on state legislative seats/election results in MO–just waiting for the final results in the Aug 7th primary to identify the D general election candidates in 2 of the races.

  44. 44.

    Marcopolo

    @Crebit: Well, there are three months to go. If Mitrano could locate & energize a couple hundred folks to knock on doors & make calls & put out a kickass campaign video that jump started fundraising there’s always a chance but normally you’d already see signs of that in a campaign by now.

    And then there’s always the possibility Reed gets caught out in some kind of scandal or some other outside event overtakes the election. That, of course, is why you always want candidates for all the races.

  45. 45.

    Jim Parish

    I’ve always found it amusing to compare “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” to the Moody Blues’ “Nice to Be Here”. They’re similar songs in some ways, but “Nice to Be Here” is calmer and saner.

  47. 47.

    Never Made A Political Ad (clearly)

    Is this a crazy idea? I’ve been thinking of a short video directed at people who have long been R, voted Trump, and are now maybe having misgivings, but it’s hard to turn your back on one party when you have thrown in with them for so long.

    I’m thinking of two women sitting at a kitchen table, having a discussion as if one has been learning one bad thing after another about her husband. The woman says something along the lines of:

    I know how much you cared about him. You trusted him. You thought it would last, and maybe it will. But you’re telling me now that you know he has lied to you. He’s cheated on you. He’s taken money out of your joint account and put it into his own. I know how hard it is to face this. You have to give up so much to do anything about it. But there are some smaller, easier steps you can take. Because now you know that his friends have been covering for him. They’ve lied to you. They told you he didn’t cheat. When he hurt you, they said he didn’t, and blamed it on you. I know it’s hard to leave someone you’ve built a life with. But you don’t have to keep supporting his friends. You didn’t marry them. Maybe, just maybe, without those so-called friends, he’ll be forced to treat you a bit better.

    Close with a full screen “Hold Trump Accountable. Don’t Vote Republican For Congress.”

    My assumption here is that people feel much more strongly about their attachment to a presidential candidate than to their congresscritter.

    Thoughts?

  48. 48.

    smintheus

    @Fair Economist: Gerrymandering is basically a huge gamble against the likelihood of a wave election. Gerrymandering typically tries to create a large number of moderately safe seats, rather than a smaller number of very safe ones. A wave election can therefore turn a ridiculously high number of districts from one party to the other, even in parts of the country where you wouldn’t have thought it possible.

  50. 50.

    Never Made A Political Ad (clearly)

    I edited the previous one, but I guess I waited too long. Here’s a slightly better version, still probably lame.

    Is this a crazy idea? I’ve been thinking of a short video directed at people who have long been R, voted Trump, and are now maybe having misgivings, but it’s hard to turn your back on one party when you have thrown in with them for so long.

    I’m thinking of two women sitting at a kitchen table, having a discussion as if one has been learning one bad thing after another about her husband. The woman says something along the lines of:

    I know how much you cared about him. You trusted him. You thought it would last, and maybe it will. But you’re telling me now that you know he has lied to you. He’s cheated on you. He’s taken money out of your joint account and put it into his own. I know how hard it is to face this. You have to give up so much to do anything about it. But there are some smaller, easier steps you can take. Because now you know that his friends have been covering for him. They told you he didn’t cheat, but they knew he was and lied about where he was and what he was doing. When he hurt you, they said he didn’t, and blamed it on you. I know it’s hard to leave someone you’ve built a life with. But you don’t have to keep supporting his friends. You didn’t marry them. Maybe, just maybe, without those so-called friends, he’ll be forced to treat you a bit better.

    Close with a full screen “Hold Trump Accountable. Don’t Vote Republican For Congress.”

    My assumption here is that people feel much more strongly about their attachment to a presidential candidate than to their congresscritter. I’m also very sincerely aware of how hard it is for people who have a longtime relationship with republicans to change their mind. Maybe this is an effective way to soften support for Trump’s enablers.

    Thoughts?

  51. 51.

    Fair Economist

    @smintheus: The Republican gerrymanders aren’t meaningful gambles like that. They create R+8 or better districts, and the kind of wave necessary to invert the benefits is so large it wouldn’t matter. Even the 1932 or 1964 landslides wouldn’t invert these gerrymanders.

    A decent wave will overcome the gerrymander but in almost any scenario the Republicans will still have more seats than with honest districting.

  53. 53.

    Nicole

    Way back when, the Capitol Steps did a parody of this as Newt, Newt, Newt, going out my back door. I’ve been unable to hear it as anything else since.

  55. 55.

    JoeyJoeJoe

    One of the problems for Republicans is that some gerrymandering has been undone. Pennsylvania has an all new congressional map, and Republicans are conceding at least two seats as a direct result (5,6). Also, population changes over the course of a decade affects gerrymandering. There are Texas districts, for example, that were drawn to be 60% or so McCain districts, and Hillary won them. In some states, this is also to the Demicrat’s benefit

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