Sorry I’ve been slacking on the fundraising. I think a lot of people are waiting for our big combined list to give. We’ve been taking a lot of fliers on tough races so far, because I think the candidates in those races deserve our support and might not get much elsewhere. And one of those fliers was the Alabama Senate race, by the way.
I was thinking that for the homestretch — and I’ve seen this in the comments — maybe we should give to the most likely D take-overs. There are 40 R seats that are currently rated toss-up or better for Dems. Should I just do those?
Also too, of course I was most interested in a catchy title for the fundraiser and Forty House Seats To Freedom popped into my head right before I saw that Cook had exactly 40 R House seats rated toss-up or better for Dems and I took that as a sign from Jah.
EveryDayIHaveTheBlues
Where do we get this info re: leaning vs toss-up, etc.? I’m very interested in how my candidate in OH-1 (Aftab Pureval) is doing against the execrable Steve Chabot.
Doug!
Here’s a link:
BroD
Also
Evap
@EveryDayIHaveTheBlues: I just wrote some postcards for Pureval through postcardstovoters.org. He sounds like a great candidate!
Lapassionara
I’d like for MO2 to flip from the dreadful Ann Wagner to the Dem candidate, Cort VanOstran. Please, FSM, make it so!
Ramalama
I love these fundraisers and nods to other candidates to raise awareness. Which reminds me of a podcast I’ve just kinda started listening to… to find out what the hubbub was. Pod Save America. Which is fantastic. And they too raise awareness to candidates. Have you listened?
Cermet
Yes, do the close races
schrodingers_cat
How many do Ds need to win?
Central Planning
Catchy title: Forty for Freedom or Fight
Gretchen
I hope you’ll consider Sharice Davids of KS -03. Poll showed her ahead by 3 to take it from the awful Yoder. His whole schtick is to lie about her being a socialist and the scary brown people are coming to get you. She is Native American. I went to an opening of her new office yesterday. There were a whole bunch of people canvassing for her who have never canvassed before, including me. And lots of them were not old people, not including me!
Ella in New Mexico
Please add our awesome homegrown Xochitl Torres Small to flip NM Congressional District 2, held in the past by Steve Pearce who’s now running for governor, and which has only been held once by a Dem in decades.
I wish you could see in person how frigging HUGE this district is geographically (all that yellow? District 2). Eastern/SE NM is heavily red thanks to oil and gas and ranching, and Western is also very red due to ranching. But she’s busting her butt to get out visit allthe communities she can so she can meet everyone.
One poll has her 1pt out, others have her a few points down. Anyway, she just needs some $$$. Link here
Steeplejack (tablet)
“Forty Seats to Freedom” sounds better. “House” can be implicit, especially for this hive of politically aware jackals.
dmsilev
@schrodingers_cat: 23 flipped seats gives a 1 vote D majority in the House.
Amir Khalid
@Steeplejack (tablet):
Agreed. Much catchier. This is the slogan I’d go with, Doug! .
Amir Khalid
Completely off-topic sportsball gloat:
West Ham 1-1 Chelsea! Loverpool are two points clear at the top of the Premier League table! Yes!//
As you were.
Kay
The Trumperinos here are saying polls don’t matter because polling was wrong w/Trump, but I don’t think it was.
Anyway. If Democrats take the House they can stop the plundering of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, which is coming.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Ahem.Liverpool, not Loverpool. Words cannot say how much I miss the edit function.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: Same here. My embarrassing grammatical and punctuation errors preserved for eternity, not to mention the occasional spelling mistake.
Kay
@Gretchen:
lol
Our canvassers are middle aged and older people. They’re also like 80% women.
JR
There is one particular song on that album that seems especially relevant right now.
Kay
We’re doing the “commit to vote” card in Ohio. It’s a little complicated, but the general idea is the voter commits to vote and then we promise not to bother them again. We send the card they filled out back to them, so that’s the second contact instead of a door knock. But it’s a false promise, because not all campaigns can coordinate together (legally- they cannot) so they’ll still get canvassed by labor unions or other liberal orgs.
So don’t be mean to the canvassers. As to them, it’s the truth :)
Gretchen
@Kay: yes, women are pissed. Rage is a word I have been hearing a lot this past week.
Gretchen
@Kay: i talked to a woman yesterday who was really reluctant to sign something when she didn’t know where it was going to go. So my only pledge to vote card didn’t have a signature.
Schlemazel
@Amir Khalid:
Personally, I much prefer ‘Loverpool”! That sounds like a great place to live. “liverpool” sounds less fun
Schlemazel
@Schlemazel:
If I hd an edit function I would have added, “luckily I don’t neber make spelling or grammatical errors to correct.”
Kay
@Gretchen:
I haven’t really been talking to them about that. Our topics are health care and education and how much the tax law sucks – that’s what our D’s are running on. I don’t have time to talk to them about other things. I mean, I have time- I would talk to them about it- but I’m always conscious that I’m taking their time so I try to stick to the planned topics :)
There are a lot of women volunteers. I haven’t personally encountered the rage though.
This sounds mean and ungenerous but it’s the truth- white women voters are going to have to show me they care about this before I believe it. I’m still bitter they backed Trump. A lot of these “year of the woman” things have flopped, IMO. Not about you, obviously, but “women” as a voting group. I hope it’s true. I’ll have to see it first, though.
Amir Khalid
@Schlemazel:
Liverpool is a major British port city. It has a rich cultural heritage, being the hometown of the Beatles, among many other significant bands in music, and has an airport named after John Lennon. It is on the banks of the Mersey, as in Gerry and The Pacemakers’ Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey. The city emblem (and Liverpool FC’s) features the mythical Liver Bird, whose name rhymes with “diver” and not with “giver”.) I hear it’s not bad as cities go.
tobie
@Gretchen: Yay, Gretchen, youngster at heart!
No one is paying attention to Jesse Colvin’s race against the truly awful Andy Harris in MD-01 since the district was gerrymandered to be Maryland’s one and only Republican-held Congressional seat. But Colvin is putting up a heck of a fight and every weekend when I canvass I’m stunned at the level of support. Colvin’s a perfect fit for the district: a former army ranger who did four tours of duty in Afghanistan and is committed to protecting the Chesapeake Bay. We need more canvassers! Colvin’s got offices in Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County for those to the south.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: The generic House polls are maddening because there’s this huge systematic spread: the traditional phone polls show this huge D lead but the Internet-based polls show it as only a few points, and that is very much the difference between victory and defeat. Hard to know what to believe, but we may be getting to the time when polling of individual races is more indicative.
Schlemazel
@Amir Khalid:
but a pool of liver? Even if it is bird liver
I’d rather swim in a pool of love!
Although I love chopped chicken liver and even liver and onions.
BTW – as a kid wore the tracks out on the 45 of “Ferry Cross the Mersey”. I am familiar with their contributions to pop culture
Mary G
@Kay: I am incandescent with rage and know a lot of other women here in blue CA who are too. Interesting to hear that you aren’t seeing it in Ohio, but considering how many people showed up to march the day after the inauguration and the record number of Democratic woman running, plus the MeToo that Kavanaugh has triggered again, I think that this time is different. I hope so anyway.
EveryDayIHaveTheBlues
@Doug!: @BroD: thank you! It looks like OH-1 is an R toss-up. Go Aftab!
@Evap: yes, he is. Thanks for the postcard link, I wasn’t aware of this. Very cool.
Schlemazel
@Matt McIrvin:
Generic polls are pointless. D Congressional candidates regularly draw more votes than GOPper ones yet the GOP controlls Congress. More than Congress we really need to start burning down the GOPs control of state houses, particularly through the next 2 cycles so that we can use the 2020 census to undo the damage of the Republican gerrymangering
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: Oooh, ooh! I know!!
All of them, Katie.
;-)
Seriously, roughly 24 R to D for the Democrats to regain control of the House.
But the more we win, the more space there will be for pushing the conversation – and the legislation- leftward.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who realizes he’s probably late with this observation…”)
Amir Khalid
@Schlemazel:
But I think Gerry and The Pacemakers’ biggest hit in Liverpool has to be their cover of You’ll Never Walk Alone. That song is sacred music to them that wear red shirts on Saturday.
Matt McIrvin
Anyway, I vote for one focusing on the close races. Though these individual drives for promising long shots are good too.
Steeplejack (tablet)
Political notes:
Last weekend I got canvassed (at my RWNJ brother’s house in Henderson, NV) by someone on behalf of Democratic candidate Susie Lee (NV-3). I told the guy that I was not the resident (my brother), that my brother is a “right-wing nutjob” (exact words) but that I would make sure he got the information. I added that I was from the D.C. area and planned to vote a straight Democratic ticket, and I thanked him for being out canvassing in the Vegas heat. He seemed pretty happy with that. I didn’t envy him working my brother’s Whitey McWhiterson subdivision.
It’s interesting that nowhere on Lee’s flyer does it mention the minor detail that she is a Democrat. “Local solutions. Real results.” All righty, then. She is running against the odious Danny Tarkanian. I don’t know where the polls have her.
But that omission of party affiliation has been true of all the political ads I have had to suffer through while watching my brother’s non-DVR-equipped cable TV. (He lives on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.) All the ads seem to be personal and vitriolic. Sneering voice: “She [Jacky Rosen] voted with Nancy Pelosi 98% of the time!” Me: “I’m okay with that.” Etc. You can infer party affiliation by what the ads hammer on.
Later last week my brother’s answering machine got a robocall inviting him to Trump’s Thursday rally. That sort of brings into question my brother’s claim that he is one of those elusive “fiscally responsible Republicans” who didn’t vote for Trump but for the third-party guy (can’t remember his name) and is above the vulgar fray. But he must have some vestigial connection to be on the call list. And he certainly seems to toe the crazy Trump/GOP line, based on what I see of his Facebook feed, etc. Not exactly clear where his “I draw the line” point is, if it even exists.
Kay
@Mary G:
I’m afraid metoo isn’t reaching working class women. Which is fine, for now. Cultural-type things trickle down in a way so there’s a lag. I do think there’s a tiering of issues that people do- so if they’re wholly dependent on Medicaid they don’t focus on things like workplace harassment, because they have this pressing need that demands attention. Assault, obviously, is next-level so maybe that’s a different category. I’m just not as SURE about it as other people are.
I just remember the criticisms of Clinton that seemed so petty to me – it was like – “I just don’t care for the cut of her jib”. Come on. WTF is that? I don’t have time for that.
Kay
@Mary G:
It’s hard for me. There was a “women for Kavanaugh” bus. Like a campaign bus. With his photo on it. In DC.
The photo I saw on Twitter was mostly men. So the “women for Kavanaugh” bus is mostly men.
The women who are endorsing him because he assisted their careers. Great. Because that’s what this is about. Your career. The law professor who said he hired her daughter. Bully for you. What does that have to do with anything?
Uncle Cosmo
@Gretchen: @Ella in New Mexico: @tobie: IIUC the point of an omnium-gatherum donation jar was to bypass exactly the sort of special pleading you make in your posts.
There are no doubt a passle of worthy candidates out there & there’s only so much Jackal Ca$$$$h to go round. If you have specific candidates you want to support, you could give them directly the $$$ you might’ve tossed into Doug’s hat. No reason you shouldn’t do that, or canvass for them, or whatever else.
For the rest of us, Doogie’s approach helps identify where we’re likely to get some bang for the buck$ vs blowing the month’s wine budget on a hopeless cause. I am somewhat disappointed to see that Cook doesn’t consider WV-01 in play – I tossed the Dem there a few bucks – but then again it’s not a big concern; I gave because I have family ties to the district going back over a century.
(And tobie, anecdotal evidence =/= data. It sounds like you’re canvassing purplish areas closer to Baltimore that compared to the rest of the district look midnight blue. Colvin isn’t going to unseat that disgusting twit Harris in anything short of a blunami. I’ll probably cast about for a campaign in southern PA where there’s a bit more chance of flipping a seat.
More to the point, I wonder if this isn’t the electoral equivalent of pissing your pants while wearing a blue serge suit.* Even if the 40 Seats appeal were to raise $20K – & that’s a big beg for this blog – it only comes to $500 per seat. Nice to have but not likely to have much impact unless the recipient campaign is running on a shoestring…which leads inevitably to doubts that it has a snowball-in-hell’s chance.
——
* “You get a nice warm feeling all over, but no one else notices.” (Those who know their retro fabrics will understand.)
Lurker Steve
Could I nominate all the Toss Ups (28 GOP + 2 Dem) instead? All the GOP seats at Lean Dem or better seem to have the Dem up ~10 points in recent polls. Seems like throwing good money after a sure thing.
Uncle Cosmo
@Matt McIrvin: (sigh) The problem with generic House polls is that so many respondents will tell you the HoR is a den of thieves & all ought to be replaced (if not simply taken out & shot) – except for their own Congresscritter, who’s OK by them!
No generic Democrat has ever won a Congressional seat & none ever will.
tobie
@Uncle Cosmo: Doug! has taken suggestions for candidates to be included in a group fund in the past. Sharice Davids should be included in that fund given recent polling, which shows her winning or in a statistical dead heat. I haven’t seen any polling for Colvin, so I can understand if he’s not included.
I’m canvassing in deep red Cecil County. In projects and trailer parks. I’m seeing a groundswell of support, though, as is always the case, it ultimately depends on who goes to the polls. You’re absolutely right that anecdotes don’t constitute data. Didn’t mean to suggest they did.
J R in WV
The Clinton family, Kerry, so many other Democratic heroes and leaders, have been tarnished by unceasing and despicable lies for decades now. And that continuous drumbeat eventually sticks for some people, even many people.
When you ask them “But what are they supposed to have done wrong?” they can’t answer with anything but platitudes about something must have happened.
Hillary Clinton is the most honest and above-board person in the history of American Politics. She has been investigated without letup since Bill was elected to state-wide office as AG of Arkansas, and they haven’t been able to lay even a single misdemeanor on her, ever.
Whitewater, they were taken by a con-man like everyone else he stole from. Cattle futures, she bought an investment vehicle on the open market and later sold it for a profit. There’s just nothing there for her haters. Nothing.
Yet she only won the election by nearly 3 million votes… and that was close enough for the Republicans to steal it AGAIN!!!!! Grrrr.
Mary G
@Kay: I think health care is the unifying issue across every voter, so you are right to concentrate on that. The environment is big here, but I wouldn’t think it would be a winner where you are canvassing.
Major Major Major Major
@Kay:
This is indeed the thing every single MAGA idiot says in response to tweets about polls.
Generic polls are a decent proxy for results, especially in districts where there is little reliable polling. Also, the 2016 polls were fine. The national polling got the popular vote correct. State-level polling, which is used to predict states (duh), tends to lag by about a week, and that’s why it missed the Comey/NTY-fueled late break towards Trump.
Groucho48
Let me put in a plug for Nate McMurray, running against the odious Chris Collins, here in WNY. Collins had stopped his campaign for a few weeks after all the charges against him, but, he restarted it last week. McMurray is campaigning hard.
The polling predicted a fairly easy Rep win, while Collins was out, but, with his being back in, could be a lot closer. I don’t think there’s been any polling in the last week, though.
Groucho48
Whoops. Put my real name on that post in moderation. Could someone please fix or delete it?
Matt
@Kay:
Fixed that for you. Even if the House flips, there are way too many Dems still dreaming of a “grand bargain” and plenty of centrist pundits who’ll insist that THIS time the GOP will keep their promises and won’t pull the football at the last minute.
Mnemosyne
@Groucho48:
Email a front-pager from the links on the front page and ask them to nuke it. I would start with Adam or Major^4.
Ramalama
@schrodingers_cat: Learning French has made my grammar falter at times. Embarrassing!
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Matt:
What color is the sky in your world?
Mnemosyne
@Matt:
Dude. It’s not 2010 anymore. Try to keep up with current events. The Blue Dog caucus was abandoned almost a decade ago.
low-tech cyclist
Doug – glad you asked, I’d been thinking about this. Here’s my suggestions:
1) Do one for the 40 tossup or better as you propose here. (Perhaps minus any seats that the GOP has already pretty much given up on, if you’re on top of that. If not, don’t worry.)
2) A second one for the ~28 seats that are ‘Lean Republican.’ These are the ones that can turn a win into a rout. A rout isn’t out of the question. Let’s go for it.
3) Do one for the DLCC. We really really want to win back as many state legislatures as possible in November. But there are thousands of state legislature seats on the ballot this fall, and none of us can pick and choose which ones are the best to throw some money to. For this, we really have to trust the DLCC.
Since I’m lucky enough to be in a position to do so, I’m ready to kick in $100 for starters on each of these that you do, whether you do one, or two, or all three.
Redshift
I would say to stick with the closer and less well known races. The one I’m doing the most work on is Jennifer Wexton VA-10, which is widely considered to be one of the top three pickup opportunities.
I love her, she’s doing a great job taking on odious career Republican dirty trickster Barbara Comstock, but the district overlaps two of the wealthiest Democratic counties in the country, and Balloon Juice money isn’t going to be a drop in the bucket there. I’m sure she wouldn’t like me saying that, but it’s the truth. (I’ve donated to her anyway.)
Local jackals should definitely volunteer for her, but I think our fundraising should be focused where it’ll make more of a difference.
frosty
@Uncle Cosmo: “cast about for a campaign in southern PA where there’s a bit more chance of flipping a seat.”
George Scott is a Red to Blue candidate who might be able to take out Scott Perry in newly ungerrymandered PA10 (York and Harrisburg).
Jess King (Lancaster, south York Co) is a great candidate but Cook has her district as Solid R.
Groucho48
@Mnemosyne:
They got it, thanks.
Catherine D.
I’m sticking mostly local: NY-23 congress and NY-58 state senate (more than I usually donate), but I tossed Beto a few bucks.