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Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

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Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

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Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Everything’s coming up roses

Everything’s coming up roses

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This is the first really solid evidence I’ve seen that Dems are going to do well on election day. It’s also a sign that Democrats should double down on #MeToo.

Polls and 538 predictions are one thing but betting against Megan McArdle is a sure thing.

People wanted more chances to give money to Senate races. You can give here to Jacky Rosen (NV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ).

Goal Thermometer

Send some postcards here.

Reader Interactions

81Comments

  2. 2.

    Paul W.

    I don’t know what evidence anyone has that ANYONE AT ALL is taking the Blue Wave for granted. Booman also put up a post which I won’t even link because it was so depressing.

    Needless to say, not only do I ONLY see progressives and Dems talking about relentlessly getting out the vote and despairing that we will be robbed of a possible win in the House (!) much less the Senate, but the Democrats are literally invested up to their necks with the most fundraising in history for a midterm. I just don’t see it as likely that people would put their money where their mouth is, then walk away 4 weeks from seeing the results realized.

  3. 3.

    celticdsragonchick

    McMegan is sad about identity politics. Sigh. Maybe she can go buy another kitchen gadget to cheer her up.

  4. 4.

    Corner Stone

    DougJ, apparently Bobo Brooks put up some screed* yesterday about how we are all divided into 7 tribes. Will not read it but thought it may raise your blood pressure a bit if you were feeling logy.

    Have lost massive amounts of what respect I may have considered for Stephanie Ruhle as she has called the piece brilliant at least twice and keeps citing it today.

  5. 5.

    Meander

    Here’s a time sensitive cause that might be worth a front page soon:

    ” Daily Kos has teamed up with North Dakota Native Vote—an organization working with local tribes to provide free, updated identification cards, or address verification documents to tribal citizens.

    “With only a handful of days left to contact everyone and hundreds of acres of land to cover, it’s an ambitious and expensive undertaking but an important one. We can’t allow the GOP to succeed in their efforts to silence American Indian voices. Not when we can do something about it.”

    https://m.dailykos.com/stories/1805092

  6. 6.

    Hitlesswonder

    I personal enjoy that identity politics is a pejorative for any concern had by anyone who is not a white Christian male.

    How can people talk about the need to appeal to the “white working-class” and at the same time condemn identity politics? Hmmm….

  7. 7.

    Elizabelle

    She is such an asshat.

    And Ross Douthat is the latest piling on Elizabeth Warren. Fuck them both, very much.

    A friend who’s an “independent” sent me a photo of his email feed today. He said I should laugh, because it was so obvious the conservatives were losing their shit. Ron Paul sent some email entitled: “Don’t let the mob win.” Devin Nunes was dumping on Avenatti the “porn-star lawyer.” Someone else shouting that Nancy Pelosi is terrified, but of what, I cannot say.

    I hope the Blue Wave produces a tsunami of House and Senate seats and justice for us all. Including a reckoning for the bad actors. A hard, hard one.

  10. 10.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @Paul W.: The political news cycle is a distraction and an illusion – and also a daily lived experience for those few who work in political media and those who follow them. The gap between the reality on the ground and the more-manipulatable illusion of the news cycle seems like it is bigger than ever this year. At least I hope so.

  11. 11.

    ruemara

    @Hitlesswonder: Because white male is the true identity and everything else is an aberrant genetic mutation.

    @Elizabelle: I’m rooting for military tribunals for treason and the standard sentence, but I’m a touch upset. The DOJ is skipping all other courts and headed straight to the USSC for a decision on DACA. I’d like to thank everyone that sat out prior elections or was an “Or Bust” for 2016. Thank you with a mallet.

  13. 13.

    Elizabelle

    @Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: I think we might need to do a first annual Balloon Juice Stupid Pundits (which includes reporters) awards, after the midterms.

    Call out those who were not even in earth orbit. We can come up with several categories.

  17. 17.

    Amir Khalid

    @Elizabelle:
    The NYT hired Ross Douthat to fill a columnist slot, reserved for a conservative writer, that became vacant when Bill Kristol failed his probation. I think the only reason Douthat himself wasn’t failed is that there was nobody left that they could pretend was up to par, if he failed.

  19. 19.

    Burnspbesq

    @ruemara:

    The DOJ is skipping all other courts and headed straight to the USSC for a decision on DACA.

    Got a link for that? Cuz normally it doesn’t work like that.

  20. 20.

    Betty Cracker

    @ruemara: Consider “Thank you with a mallet” stolen for future purposes. I am also driven bug-shit crazy by the fact that these stupid fuck-sticks can’t see that Trump ran the most identity-based campaign since George Wallace. Yesterday, Vox reported on yet another study that suggests that yep, Obama-to-Trump voters in 2016 were motivated by racism, xenophobia and sexism, not economic anxiety. But sure, national media and certain cantankerous old senators, let’s keep fluffing the Trump voters.

  23. 23.

    Marcopolo

    I can spend my time worrying about this shit or I can spend my time making calls, knocking doors, writing postcards, urging my friends & family to vote early & to help others do the same. I know what I plan to be doing for the next three weeks and it isn’t worrying about some overall picture. Everyone keep your head down & eyes on the prize.

    If there is one thing I can pluck out of all the polling & talking & now early voting that is happening it is that no one is really actually sure who is going to show up to vote and in what numbers. Each of us can have some infinitesimally small affect on this–working together we can do something much bigger.

    I’ve written my 60 GOtV postcards today & my local Indivisible group has a total of over 200,000 written & stamped & ready to go out in the mail next Tuesday to voters all across MO. I’m pretty sure none of the polls or models of the electorate are taking that into account. Furthermore, I know there are hundreds and thousands of people here in MO just like me, doing their bit to get people to the polls. I guess we will all see what things look like Nov 7 (and I do predict a lot of undecided House races on the West Coast because of vote by mail and that may mean we don’t know who holds the House). Perhaps then we will have new things to worry about :).

    In the meantime, everyone here get out and vote as early as you can in your community. I will be voting on Friday.

    Oh, and all you Jackals have a good day!

  24. 24.

    Mary G

    Thread that made me smile, mostly for the MOTHERFUCKERS! from a good Catholic granny:

    Okay, due to the new Canadian laws I think I can now openly tell you the story of my disabled mom getting her weed plants stolen and how she got them back.— In Nicoled Blood (@Nicole_Cliffe) October 17, 2018

  25. 25.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Hitlesswonder:
    This also raises the question: is there such a thing as politics completely divorced from (some kind of) identity? I don’t believe so. The main difference between today and the past is that American and European society tended to be much more homogeneous and there were less identities people could legitimately express and have. As you allude to, the same people who complain about “identity politics” have probably never once considered themselves to have a unique identity they share with others.

    This is what is known as the concepts as the One and the Other. White, straight people are the One and literally everybody else is the Other, pushed to the margins.

  31. 31.

    MazeDancer

    Karen Tumulty had an article in yesterday’s WaPo about the disgustingly racist campaign 1-term, lying, Trump Puppet incumbent John Faso is running against BJ Candidate Antonio Delgado.

    Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Law School Grad Antonio Delgado is pictured in a hoodie and performing rap. You can see – and yell at – one of the ads at the article.

    Please write PostCards for Antonio Delgado. Turnout is what’s going to win this race. Because there are plenty GOP out there.

    And the best part is when you write to Dems in NY State, you don’t have to hold back.

    Get addresses: PostCardPatriots.com

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Corner Stone: A contact working in campaigning asked me about it because I’m a tribal specialist given my work for the Army (tribal specialist is a bit of an understatement of the work I’ve done for the Army and DOD). Here’s what I sent in reply:

    The Hidden Tribes study was done by More in Common, which is a better government/civil society group that grew out of the attempt to figure out what happened with Brexit. The Hidden Tribes study is an attempt to understand the identity groups – tribes – within the American electorate and their views on numerous issues. The study has gotten a lot of press, and while it is interesting, it has serious conceptual and methodological flaws in the studies design that call the findings into serious doubt.

    While I find the way the authors of the study broke American political identity down interesting, the actual tribes that are supposedly hidden until they’ve now revealed them, that is really the most intriguing and least problematic part of the study. The most significant finding, which got the most press because Harvard’s Yasha Mouk wrote an article about it in The Atlantic, is the findings regarding American attitudes to political correctness. This part of the study, however, provides the largest example of the conceptual problems that have warped the study’s methodology and, as a result, skewed the findings. The study’s designers/authors did not define the terms political correctness or politically correct. They don’t define it for the readers of the study and they don’t define it in the survey implement they administered. As a result there is no way to know if any of the study’s respondents, either in the focus groups or in taking the survey implement, agree on what politically correct/political correctness means. This is a huge problem with the studies design. Without a common definition of the term for the subjects of the study to respond to, their responses are completely subjective and no matter what methodological games one plays, they can’t be reconciled with each other as there is no way of knowing if any and/or all of the study’s subjects are actually talking about the same issue despite the label of politically correct. And, unfortunately because the findings around political correctness confirm Mouk’s a priori research conceptions and he has a big megaphone, these have been the findings that received the most coverage. An additional problems is the authors don’t provide the actual questions from the codebook they use to quantify their results. This is a significant tell that something hinky may be going on.

    Another major problem is the authors/researchers assertion that their breakdown of Americans into the now revealed hidden tribes provides better results across areas of concern than other studies into American’s attitudes towards the range of issues this study asks about. Unfortunately this is not the case. A careful review of their own findings, both presented as charts and graphs and in the actual indexes with the questions and results, indicates that what they claim are significantly better results than more traditional breakdowns of the American electorate by party, race, ethnicity, age cohort, education, gender, sexuality, and/or religion are often not any better than the margin of error. Additionally, researchers into American politics who rely on American National Election Survey (ANES) or leverage Pew’s surveys for their work, have reviewed the study and indicate that the results are not significantly outside of the findings of research done using the ANES and/or Pew data using the more traditional demographic breakdowns.

    The bottom line is that the study is interesting, the breakdown of Americans into seven (hidden) tribal groups is intriguing, but the results need to be seriously caveated because of the conceptual and methodological flaws in the study.

    Also, give these tweet threads a read:


    (five more tweets in the above thread)

    And:

  35. 35.

    Jeffro

    @Corner Stone: Bobo’s “point” (quotes intended) was that all our frictions are just ’cause of a few rich white people at the top of each party duking it out – everyone else just wants to quietly go along, get along, and both-sides our way into reasonable Randian-ism.

    Darn those people at the top! Liberal elites are just like conservative elites, wouldn’t you agree? Bobo says so.

  37. 37.

    Hitlesswonder

    @Betty Cracker: I think Obama-to-Trump voters voted for Obama out of economic anxiety.

    It’s just another example of the reversal of truth about the two (Obama is a narcissist, Obama puts himself first and the country second, Obama is in the thrall of anti-American powers).

  38. 38.

    hitchhiker

    Well … we’ll see in a few weeks, but from where I am the desire to vote against Republicans and their Trump-protecting ways is off every chart.

    We’ve been waiting two goddamn years, and every hour there’s a reminder how much of a mess they’ve made. So I don’t think that wave has crested.

    But what do I know? Nobody is paying me to write op eds for a national paper. It’s great to know that if I’m right and she’s whacko, she’ll still have her job, though!

  39. 39.

    ChrisS

    Why do the democrats have to continue playing identity politics?

    Why can’t they just be white, male, upper class folks who like pop country, NASCAR, (eta: and GUNS, obviously), and Jesus Christ like real Americans?

  42. 42.

    eclare

    @Hitlesswonder: I read a study, I can’t remember where, that said exactly that. Republicans voting for Obama were the anomaly, not Obama voters coming home to Republicans now that the “crisis” had faded.

  45. 45.

    Immanentize

    @Elizabelle: They are not piling on Warren, they are trying to pre-damage her.

    But in 2 years she can say, “Really? That is the only crap you have to fling?”

  48. 48.

    NickM

    Doug — would it be possible for you to set up a fundraiser like this, but for Democratic governor candidates? I’d like to contribute to Gillum and Cordray and Abrams and Evers, etc. and I guess I will separately but it might be nice to have one place to contribute to all the close governors’ races — and there are a bunch — at once. Either way, thanks for what you’re doing here — I’ve given this way and I’ll give again.

  51. 51.

    Ocotillo

    One of Beto’s first votes! Mrs. O went over to visit her Republican mother (who voted straight R in 2016). MIL was starting to work on mail in ballot. After a conversation with my wife, she ended up voting for Beto. MIL is of clear mind, she is just less mobile these days.

    Made me think, there are a lot of Alzheimers and Dementia people living in nursing homes. I wonder how many of them are voting and by voting, I mean, their offspring are actually filling out their ballot on their behalf?

  52. 52.

    Juice Box

    That op-ed cheered me up because McMegan is always, always, always wrong.

    @Hitlesswonder: I know someone who was particularly disgusted by Obama’s arrogant decision to name Obamacare after himself. Sigh.

  53. 53.

    danielx

    @Hitlesswonder:

    How can people talk about the need to appeal to the “white working-class” and at the same time condemn identity politics? Hmmm….

    It’s easy! Talking about the need to appeal to the “white working class” is one of the ways (white, non-working class) pundits avoid belonging to the “white working class”.

    In other news, I read this WP article last night while waiting to pick up carryout food at a local establishment and damn near threw my phone through the window. Turning into one of those people who mutter to themselves in public; foaming at the mouth in public cannot be far off.

    Roberts assures audience Supreme Court will serve ‘one nation,’ not one party or interest

  55. 55.

    Citizen Alan

    @Hitlesswonder:

    I’m more pessimistic. At this point, I honestly think that McCain and Romney could both have beaten Obama in their respective races if they had gone flat out racist like shitgibbon did.

  56. 56.

    Marcopolo

    @NickM:Yes! My comment from the last fundraising thread.

    So I think I’m gonna jump on the Gov train. Just tried to find the thing about the 10 closest House races to no avail. So all the Gov races Cook has listed between Lean D and Lean R: Gillum (FL), Abrams (GA), Hubbell (IA), Kelly (KS), Mills (ME), Sisolak (NV), Cordray (OH), Sutton (SD), Evers (WI), Edmondson (OK), Grisham (NM).

    @Ocotillo: This is anecdata so take it with a grain of salt, but one of the guys (there are like 3 of us in a sea of women) who comes to write postcards who is a veteran said that when his unit was deployed overseas, his CO filled out everyone’s absentee ballot for them.

  57. 57.

    Elizabelle

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: That’s catchy! And she’s in DC (suburban MD) this very week. October 21 at the Fillmore.

    Thank you. Had heard OF Lily Allen, but never actually heard her. Such an angelic voice, and such on point and NSFW lyrics.

  59. 59.

    Adam L Silverman

    @schrodingers_cat: I haven’t read any of her books. I only know about the tiger mom one, which I never read. I honestly don’t pay any attention to her. Being on the faculty at Yale Law School is not something that gets my attention.

  60. 60.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Marcopolo:

    I can spend my time worrying about this shit or I can spend my time making calls, knocking doors, writing postcards, urging my friends & family to vote early & to help others do the same.

    1. Amen.

    2. Volunteers are *everywhere* in our locale. Yesterday I met a postcard posse at the local coffee shop: they’re writing postcards for down-ballot, State Legislature candidates.

    Also yesterday: I activated the Introvert Network to affix stamps on thousands of “I pledge to vote” postcards. Of the volunteers who’ve already RSVP’d, there’s a 50-year age range. Zero range in enthusiasm: everyone’s at 11 out of 10.

    3. These are historic times. Jump in, however you can. John Cole is right: bringing food is a great way to help!

  64. 64.

    Cacti

    @Hitlesswonder:

    I personal enjoy that identity politics is a pejorative for any concern had by anyone who is not a white Christian male.

    White, Christian, heterosexual, cisgendered male is our normative citizen.

    The remaining concerns of the numeric majority who don’t fit this profile are narrow and outside the mainstream. ;-)

  67. 67.

    Barbara

    @Meander: Meander, I want to let you know that I made a much higher than the suggested $3 donation to this cause. There is nothing that pisses me off more than voter suppression.

  68. 68.

    Barbara

    @VeniceRiley:

    Heidi has a ton in her warchest, why is she not doing this?

    She probably is doing some, but I don’t think the candidates can coordinate with independent organizations, which might have better data and outreach to specific populations.

  70. 70.

    Ella in New Mexico

    Hey Doug–just wanted to update you and everyone else who gave during the first round. My candidate, Xochitl Torres Small in NM’s third Congressional District outraised her opponent more than 2:1 this quarter!! Our small part made a difference!!!

    She’s covering a geographically giant district, that has leaned Republican for years because its got a ton of our state’s most conservative rural, heavily oil, gas and ranching industry populations. But she’s using her money to reach out to every town and community, Red and Blue. She’s emphasizing she wants to work with EVERYBODY from both sides of the aisle. She’s got a few well known local Republicans supporting her and doing commercials saying “vote for the person, not the party this year”.

    Cross your fingers, everybody.

  71. 71.

    jl

    McArdle has a point. Anybody who is not filthy rich is a special interest minority group even if it’s 1/2 of the population. /s

  72. 72.

    J R in WV

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    I kicked in to Ms Xochitl Torres Small quite a while ago… we have spread the money to many candidates, a few on a schedule, mostly when I get an itch to contribute. I have spent way too much this election cycle, lots of veteran women, by which I mean Lt Col (ret) Major (ret) etc running for congress. Pilots, former CIA agent, etc.

    Stacy running for Gov ion GA, also too. I’m praying for that Blue Wave to convert the Senate back into a legislative body, from the corrrupt shithole it is under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, chief viper of the Senate on behalf of racists everywhere.

  75. 75.

    Kathleen

    .@Paul W.: Booman is always depressing, and most of his commenters live in Emoangst, Mississippi. To quote the esteemed efgoldman, “Effem”.

  79. 79.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @J R in WV: ‘Awesome! I wish I had more money right now–finishing my NP and not working full time are taking a toll on my political contributions this cycle. :-)

    I’m curious how you heard of her. I’ve actually been pretty impressed by her energy: positive, connecting with people on a human level, very smart but genuinely down to earth with folks.

  80. 80.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Paul W.: We talked about that Booman post earlier. His premonitions of doom seem mostly based on his observation that taking the Senate is unlikely, which we all knew and which is based on one-off, small-number phenomena. It’s not as if there’s any indication of the House race getting worse–quite the contrary at the moment. It’s closer than any of us would like, I’d prefer it if the 538 model had our odds at 99% rather than 7 out of 9 or whatever, but the Dems seem to be pulling away.

  81. 81.

    WaterGirl

    @Matt McIrvin: @Paul W.: I consider all the polling and predictions to be kind of a stab in the dark this time around.

    How can we accurately make predictions when we have never before lived in (or through) the bizarro world we have right now. There are probably a dozen ways in which this year is unlike any other. I think all the predictions are crap. We just have to keep moving forward and fight like hell so there are no regrets.

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